Antisemitism
Antisemitism is a reader's guide to Vol I of Hannah Arendt's " The Origins of Totalitarianism" , a helpful digest of her ideas , and useful to the novice student of history .
Parts I and III Vol I guide
Who was Hannah Arendt ? Hannah Arendt was born to assimilated German - Jewish parents in 1906 . Precocious and headstrong , she entered university at a young age , and under the tutelage of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers she receives a doctorate in Philosophy at age 22 . In 1933 she is arrested by the Gestapo for Zionist activities and kept for eight days . On release she fled Germany and found herself a refugee in France , where she begins a career in journalism as well as aiding Zionist causes . With war looming she is interned by the French at a camp in Gurs , where she rallies her fellow-refugees and escapes in time to evade the eventual fate of those left behind : Auschwitz . With her husband -to -be , Heinrich Blucher , she sails for New York in 1941 and ekes out a living while composing the work which will make her name : The Origins of Totalitarianism .
This trenchant analysis of an unprecedented system of government was doubtless informed by her experience: as an assimilated Jew , as one fleeing persecution, and as a refugee aiding the Zionist cause .
Her lectures at American universities will be collected in several publications , and her reportage on the trial of Adolf Eichmann , in 1963 , will make her a controversial public figure . She died in 1975 in New York .
“ Origins…” is a three-volume work : Antisemitism , Imperialism , and Totalitarianism . Historically , the arrival of political antisemitism c1870 coincides with the full flowering of European industrialization and its attendant necessity to procure new markets and resources overseas . The brutalization of native peoples in lawless exploitation backed by State violence then is turned back on a European polity to be enslaved , starved , and slaughtered by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes . The Jews were but the first group to be so targeted . Antisemitism proposed a racial category in the service of a political movement ; imperialism justified its crimes against humanity in like manner , and totalitarianism transformed the means of terror into an end in itself .
Coming as it did at the onset of the Cold War , Arendt’s startling identification of Stalinism as co-equal with Nazism as a model of governance based on terror was as gratifying to conservatives as it was confounding to leftists . The erudition , breadth of sensibility , and political sophistication of the author were on full display . No one had ever seen anything like it , and her position as an intellectual of the first order was made .
The enduring value of this seminal work has been overshadowed by the furor that distorted the author’s public profile after the 1963 publication of her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker magazine . The agency and responsibility that she imputed to Jewish leaders , and to European political leaders as well , in the destruction of the Jews , opened the floor to painful interrogations still unresolved . Her courage , her moral clarity and her commitment are best summed up in the credo her filmic stand-in delivers to a college audience in the bio-pic “ Hannah Arendt” : “…the manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly… “
Taking on all of ‘Origins…’ presented an insurmountable task to this writer . The project thus limited will afford the reader new to Arendt’s work the opportunity to ease herself into a difficult and densely argued historical narrative . Parsing its rhetorical style is best done in manageable doses , I’ve found ; tackling all three volumes at once would exhaust both the audience and the writer . It’s a bit like Shakespeare -you’re not going to get it the first time through ; all the more reason to not bite off more than we can chew .
[Original Introduction]
Who was Thomas Hobbes? Besides knowing that he wrote the lines sentencing “natural man” to an existence “nasty, brutish, and short” and that “Hobbesian” was shorthand for a dog-eat-dog world, I had precious little idea of the man. Hannah Arendt so confidently made of him the prophet of the bourgeoisie some 300 years after his death that I found myself both cowed by her erudition and powerless to apply any critical thinking to her argument. Just making sense of it was more than enough, it seemed. But this is no way to read history, even a history as broad and elucidating as Arendt’s. Interrogating Arendt’s account and situating the venerable Scottish philosopher’s prescience was only the beginning of a project that has led me far and wide among the concepts, personalities, and events that figure prominently in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Who were Disraeli, Drumont, Rothschild, Goebbels, Stalin, Dreyfus? The more pivotal the figure the less agreement there would appear to be among biographers.
Other blindspots equally demanded my attention, among them the nature of the “nation-state.” A term that is at once so familiar and so abstract, the nation-state remains difficult to pin down, and yet a grounded working definition is essential to understanding a point central to Arendt’s argument in Origins. We have work to do. By “we” I do not mean academics passing judgment on this or that doctoral thesis, but rather those like myself who have no professional stake in reading history: the layman, the AP student, the collegian. Origins, in all of its detail and complexity, is a thorn in the side of many the specialist but a mighty stimulant for those among us eager to confront the next fork in the road of historical understanding.
In confronting the truth of history Arendt’s gaze ranges far and wide, from the precious salons of bourgeois Paris as depicted by Proust to the sweaty nightmare of Conrad’s Congo, from the millennial Judaic promise of redemption to the unhinged “Aryan” rampage toward global domination. Origins is a famously difficult read, but one whose rhetorical style is even harder to resist. While I cannot pretend to mount a critique I am intent on fleshing out the figures and guiding ideas Arendt brings to the stage. For example, Arendt posits the antisemitism of the late nineteenth century as breaking decisively with the religiously based judeophobia of centuries prior. Very well, but what was the nature of this evolving antisemitism, and what were the actual motors that drove, for instance, the junkyard journalism of Alfred Dreyfus’ chief persecutor, Edouard Drumont? Were they purely secular, or was the Church complicit?
Going forward we will do our best to plumb the historical figures who arise in Arendt’s narrative, and also assay the usefulness of the works she cites so as to guide the reader interested in further research. Archival material and that only available in the original German we cannot evaluate; in its place we examine selections from the trove of memoir, history, and theory circulated after the initial publication of Origins and its subsequent revisions.
II) Author’s Critical Commentary on Arendt and Outline of Part One: Antisemitism
In her preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt bemoans the absence of any history of antisemitism save those that recount an unending series of catastrophes unleashed on the Jewish people, or alternatively, those that recount the improbable domination of the world by a tribe condemned to wander. The first sort eliminates the reality of Jewish agency, while the second sort reinscribes the notion of Jewish uncanniness, or otherness. One emerges from a condescending psychology of victimhood, the other from within the humid recesses of paranoia and hatred. Neither variety, according to Arendt, captures the truth of antisemitism as an evolving historical reality.
This, then, is the task Arendt has set herself: to shed light on the function and foundations of antisemitism, particularly as they connect to the distinctly twentieth-century political formations of Totalitarianism. I demonstrate the way that she achieves this by amending the historical record, beginning with the emergence of the term ‘antisemitism’ itself. Unlike terms with a similar lexical construction, such as ‘anti-communism,’ which positions itself in reference to a distinct ideology that is aware of itself as such (i.e. communism), antisemitism seems to tilt at a phantom: the “semitist.”
Crucially, “semite” refers not to an ideology, nor to a racial or ethnic group, but to a linguistic one. In the mid-nineteenth century, German philologists found enough similarities among the southern Mediterranean tongues to posit a family of languages they subsequently called semitic. This served as a jumping-off point for nineteenth-century hack journalist and would-be socialist politician, Wilhelm Marr , to subsequently coin and popularize the term “anti-semite.” Marr also founded the pro-German, xenophobic movement, the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga) in 1879, proudly opposing what he considered to be dangerous foreign influences in German society.
Disappointed by the failure of the revolutions of 1848 and frustrated by the fruitlessness of his opportunistic career moves, Marr adopted the term “anti-semitism” to designate a populist politically-motivated movement aimed at denying Jews social standing and legitimacy in civil society. These social goods, Marr claimed, were originally won for Jews through the efforts of socialists; but, having secured these gains, Jewish allegiance to leftist egalitarian goals dissipated. Marr’s lexical innovation–to cloak a head-on attack on Jewish figures and their political commitments in an oblique pseudoscientific turn of phrase–was thus designed to avoid the backlash his intemperate denunciations of Jewish “power” might occasion in what he called the “Jewish-dominated press.”
The distinction Arendt draws between judeophobia, the religiously-based hatred dating from Roman times, and modern antisemitism owes much to the chronological discontinuity of the two. But to imagine that the latter superseded the causative power of the former simply on account of its virulence and catastrophic consequences is to ignore the hand of the Church and its adherents in modern politics.
The career of Edouard Drumont is a case in point. This junkyard dog of late nineteenth-century French journalism had been a nobody before gaining a position at a Catholic journal. His platform thus secured, Drumont subsequently renewed his vows and committed himself to promoting the geopolitical agenda of a conservative Catholic establishment allied with the army, and dead set against the so-called “judaization” of his countrymen. Drumont’s incoherent blend of populism and racist fearmongering eventually put him at odds with the elite bastions of the faith, but this didn’t negate the entree into journalism the alliance afforded him. Indeed, it wasn’t Drumont’s antisemitism that eventually provoked a rupture with the Catholic establishment but rather his vitriolic, populist attacks on elite figures associated with the Church.
The relationship between populist or fascist movements and organized religion is a complex one. In its glorification of violence, Nazi power brazenly repudiated Christian ethics – all the while claiming to defend Christian society from its enemies. This fact alone captures one of the critical challenges in apprehending and defining ideologies that boast a mass following: There is always a danger in taking ideology at face value. Can we, for instance, rely on the testimony of the Nazis, or for that matter, the Church, when trying to understand the de facto ideological commitments of the group? We may instead draw conclusions that are both more illuminating and sound by investigating the observable actions of these groups when, as it were, the chips were down.
Arendt makes a fast distinction between the millennial hatred of Jews as the “killers of Christ” and an ideology born in the latter part of the nineteenth century that reached its apotheosis under the avowedly anti-Christian regime of Nazi Germany. A proper history, one that acknowledged Jewish antagonism as well as persecution by Gentiles, was yet to be
written. To overcome this myopic understanding of Jewish agency, Arendt offers a more nuanced description of Jewish-Gentile relations.
Arendt points to a late medieval period so perilous for the Jews of Europe that they themselves could entertain a racial (rather than a doctrinal or confessional) divide responsible for fueling their inhumane treatment. Arendt’s chicken-and-egg theorizing in this regard (i.e. which came first: Jewish retrenchment into mystical beliefs and racial demonization, or Gentile alienation from the Jews as a people?) might appear a petty distinction to those with less regard for the role of ideas in human behavior. Arendt asserts that this shift by the Jews of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in evaluating the source of their alienation constituted the “condition sine qua non for the birth of antisemitism,” but this needn’t sidetrack nor determine our own study of the matter. Rather than accept this as a final and universal conclusion, we may explore, cultivate, and attenuate new perspectives by acquainting ourselves with more up-to-date histories of the Jewish people. (INSERT NOTE ON KATZ) (Here we must refer to the revisionist school of Salo Baron, whose student, Norman Cantor, has written on the intellectual retrenchment c1300 that involved the Kabbalah).
Modern Gentile historians developed an interest in the culture and history of the Jews of Europe only with their emancipation and assimilation to the norms of the dominant culture during the nineteenth century. This interest was discolored, and perhaps driven, by fury towards Jewish achievement. Indeed, the histories that followed prominently featured trends of hostility and violence that had punctuated Jewish-Gentile relations through the ages. Gentile historians and other agents invested in defining a monolithic Jewish identity ignored actual Jewish agency, filling this lacuna with narratives constructed to fit a specific vision of Jewish values, goals, and behavior.
One such work that has become especially influential is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1905), a fantasy cooked up by the security service of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Nicholas had been courting Western capital to finance his country’s industrialization. Western nations, repelled by the hideous pogroms visited upon Russian Jewish communities, initially greeted proposals with a tepid response. To undermine international sympathy for Russian Jews and thus encourage Western investment, Nicholas and his advisors executed a propaganda war, promoting, in particular, tropes of covert Jewish power and treachery. Although entirely debunked as early as the 1920s, the pamphlet stoked the popular imagination and reinforced prejudicial attitudes through the Nazi era, and has continued to do so to this day.
Tasked with recording a history of the Jewish people, historians, Jewish and Gentile, have generally offered incompatible versions of events. According to these ideologically-driven and ideologically-reinforcing stories, Jews were either beleaguered innocents or underhanded aggressors. Elements of truth that characterized one narrative defied inclusion in the other and vice versa. That the separation of Jews from broader society might partly have been the result of their violent antagonism to the Gentile world came as a rude surprise to those convinced that Judaism owed its superiority to a tradition of tolerance and human equality, a belief that, even in its secular form, appeared to portray Jews as a people “chosen by God” among all other peoples.
Arendt’s impatience with the “irritating stereotypes” clouding Jewish historiography is counterbalanced by her recognition of the external forces that truly engendered disaster. Nowhere were the Jews politically independent after Rome destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Hence, the constant need for protection from state authorities and chronic political exclusion might explain the perception that different instances of Jewish persecution represented mere iterations of an eternal and unchanging helplessness. That the catastrophes going back to Roman times had produced Jewish martyrs served to sanctify the rejection of a surrounding culture deemed idolatrous. This pattern of both belief and behavior served to convince most historians of the crucial role played by a perennial Christian animus in the alienation of the Jewish community.
Arendt clearly argues that it was the voluntary Jewish separation from the non-Jewish world (a stance sanctioned by Talmudic law) and not the hostility of Christians that produced the dissociation between the two, since the very survival of the Jewish people depended on it. Thus, only with emancipation and assimilation did political antisemitism come to play any role in the conservation of the people, “since only then did Jews aspire to being admitted to non-Jewish society.”
In simplest terms, the premodern actors would have said: “We are Jews; we don’t come near your demonstrations of faith, we can’t eat with you, marry you, drink with you; just leave us alone and let the authorities deal with us.” To which the Gentiles would have responded: “Go ahead and believe you’re better, you killers of Christ; stay in your ghetto, lend us your money, and don’t you dare get out of line...” Clearly, they were not exactly on the same page; however, there was mutual rejection and separation, and this is why assimilation posed such a problem for all parties concerned.
Neither observant Jews nor assimilated Jews nor the state nor society could disregard Jewish achievement and power, despite their incompatibility with accepted notions of Jewishness. Those who challenged conventional assumptions about Jewish culture and history, particularly by exploring the lived complexities of Jewish-Gentile social dynamics, often invited criticism and scrutiny. The controversy that greeted Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial, for example, may very well be traced to her fundamental rejection of the one-dimensional story in which Jews represent nothing more or less than eternally innocent victims of Gentile wrath.
During the course of her investigations, Arendt found not one history of antisemitism even remotely up to her standard. Given the central role of Jews in a world event of unparalleled destruction, and given that the imagined power of so tiny a polity could be offered successfully as a pretext for genocide and war, Arendt observed the necessity and significance of developing a history that captured the realities of both Jewishness and antisemitism.
In creating such a history, Arendt advocates a critical and curious attitude toward history, as well as an openness toward understanding the agents, forces, and dynamics that shape its trajectory. She appeals, on the one hand, to a spirit of “resistance” to reality, which is to say, a refusal to surrender in the face of horrors and reject the meaning and reality of human life and agency. Those still reeling from the traumas of WWII and the Holocaust understandably yielded to a vision of both the horrors and our deliverance from them as preordained, accepting the extremity of evil and humanity’s triumph over it, as supernatural. But, in viewing human experience through the farsighted lens of history, we must resist succumbing to the irreality that Nazi leaders boasted would be their deliverance: that their crimes would so outrage both commonsense and morality that a stunned disbelief would subdue any assessment of their human responsibility.
Arendt points up the subterranean streams of “crackpot” histories that were ignored or discounted by learned public opinion, exposing how these narratives grew increasingly nasty and insidious in their isolation. (An example of this is the continued impact of the Protocols.) When these characterizations of history surfaced amid the catastrophes of totalitarian dominance, they were equated with totalitarianism itself. This, Arendt notes, was a mistake akin to identifying the systemic racism of the American South with the fundamental logic of totalitarianism. To view this unprecedented system of domination as resting on any particular -ism is to fatally misread the abuse of ideologies by totalitarian states. Although totalitarians rise to power in the guise of crusaders committed to an ideological mission (conducting a class struggle, for example) they inevitably abandon any credo standing in the way of their grab for unlimited power.
In the light of this sobering insight, Arendt disabuses the reader of any easy relation between nineteenth-century antisemitism and Nazism. If antisemitism alone had motivated the Nazi campaign, then one could reasonably infer the Romani, Slavs, and others branded “sub-human” by the Third Reich might have escaped death. However, this was not so. This fact and others serve to indicate, as Arendt maintains, that Nazism and antisemitism are not one and the same ideology.
Nor was the emergence of Zionism, which condemned the false havens of assimilation and tolerance, a response to Nazi persecution and slaughter. Zionism, the actual response to a resurgent, politically-oriented antisemitism, and the counter-ideology to antisemitism itself, predated the horrors of Nazism by several decades.
As for the Nazi exploitation of the Protocols: Only a proper history of antisemitism can explain why the tale had enough plausibility among post-Enlightenment Europeans to be useful as anti-Jewish propaganda. While it was patently untrue that a council of Jewish elders had mapped out a system of world domination, the appeal of such a myth resided in the substantial documented international influence of the Rothschild family in European finance.
Volume One of Origins covers the era beginning with the privileges of the court Jews and ending with the Dreyfus Affair. During this period, we witness a transformation in antisemitic propaganda from tropes maligning the reality of Jewish agency (that is, skewed representations of Jews who, in fact, served as purveyors to the courts of Europe) to the murderous brand intent on proving a Jewish plot to achieve world domination. To make sense of this evolving image and its connection to a totalizing logic of oppression, it will be useful to note here that, as Arendt explains, antisemitism has most often needed to attach itself to weightier, more concrete issues in order to gain any traction in the public mind or staying power as a political force. Historically, it has not been enough to simply insult the Jews. Rather, it has been necessary to connect their actions, beliefs, and very presence to crises of unemployment, economic decline, political corruption, or other social ill for which the protean notion of Jewishness may be made to shoulder blame.
Questions for consideration:
What brought Gentile-Jewish relations to such a pass in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries?
What was the content of the Jewish antagonism to which Arendt refers ?
Regarding these questions, I can’t recommend highly enough Norman Cantor’s The Sacred Chain - A History of the Jews. The author provides a lively, cosmopolitan narrative unburdened by the stodgy demands of strict chronology. He hops around as the subject demands and is transparent about the strategies Jews employed in their quest for progress and parity. For example, when discussing the arrangements Iberian Jews made in order to study and learn from the best minds in medieval Cordoba, he asks the reader to consider what a rational contemporary would do if attracted to the natural sciences: dutifully study the Talmud at a Yeshiva, or enroll at the University of Notre Dame? Even a chapter or two of Cantor, or a visit to his online expositions, will prove both profitable and enjoyable. Another source to consider is Jacob Katz’s Exclusiveness and Tolerance. Cited by Arendt as an antidote to the “lachrymose” histories of the Jewish community, it demands more of the reader, but is worth the trouble.
Chapter One: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense
Did the Nazis use the “Jewish Question” merely as a demagogic tool to win over the masses? Was Jewish persecution an incidental or instrumental rather than a fundamental aspect of Nazi ideology? There is good reason to believe this is the case. The notion that a people without a nation of their own could serve as the axis upon which untold destruction could turn is a moral outrage – indeed, an “outrage to common sense.” How could a group so vulnerable to state repression be targeted for violence on the basis of purportedly threatening the state’s power? How could the Nazis so easily gain support for the inferno of WWII and the Holocaust by citing a “Jewish threat” that was plainly contrived?
To understand the actual role of antisemitism in the rise of right-wing populist movements, it is crucial to understand the nature and function of nationalism and the attendant trend of xenophobia.
Nationalism, understood as uncritical patriotism and devotion to one’s nation above all others, was a powerful tool for recruiting populist support and forming a conservative coalition in the Reichstag. The Nazis, however, did not espouse a traditional nationalist stance. From its inception, the Nazi Party was explicitly supranational, aiming from the outset at global supremacy in the same vein as the antisemitic parties that had preceded it.
The oft-cited “nationalism” of the Nazis was not an integral feature of Nazi ideology, but essentially propaganda aimed at consolidating the Party’s alliance with Germans who believed in some version of “Germany First!” The Nazi Party’s celebration of the nation-state, like its inflammatory antisemitism, was ‘for show’ rather than ideological. Nonetheless, these performances were effective tools for attracting a jingoist following at a time when the nation-state was in decline. Indeed, Arendt sensibly recalls how it was the collapse, rather than elevation, of nation-states that prepared the way for the worst that antisemitism could unleash.
How did the Jews become a flash-point for popular resentment ? To illustrate this , Arendt refers to Tocqueville’s portrait of the French aristocracy just prior to the French Revolution. Under feudalism, society was divided into a simple three-part class hierarchy: the nobility, the church, and peasants. French nobles occupied the most powerful positions in society, dominating the Army, government, and upper clergy. As the feudal system was gradually replaced by Early Modern capitalist institutions, a middle class (bourgeoisie) emerged. Towns and cities freed themselves from aristocratic domination, and the aristos eventually found themselves in a precarious position: They had privilege without real power and fortune without a concrete role in society. They were regarded by the newly-minted and increasingly powerful bourgeoisie as parasites–useless high-class snobs who could neither protect nor lead.
In the recent past, Jews, such as those preceding the Rothschilds, had been influential state bankers. Under the new social order, they came to be eclipsed by the bureaucracy as the state itself began issuing bonds to finance public works, such as schools, railroads, public infrastructure, etc. But some Jews were still awfully rich–and in the public eye to boot. Their fortunes had likewise outlasted their power, and their wealth was no longer tied to a function. Here, Arendt’s insight into how societies operate is arresting.
According to Arendt, it is more accurate to conceive of society as a system of relationships than as a collection of individuals. These relationships may be positive or negative for the parties involved, but it is clear that no one can opt out of society altogether, no matter how autonomous they are or how peripheral their connection to a particular community. Even between rulers and the oppressed there is a relation of sorts, albeit of the meanest kind–consider the charities that are funded by the very companies whose zealous devotion to profit throws people out of work and into the breadline! Thus, even individuals who are considered “outsiders” are connected to the society they inhabit in many complicated ways, and this may engender all sorts of unexpected consequences.
In the decades prior to WWII there occurred a very real decline in both Jewish function and power and thus a changing relationship between Jews and Gentiles in German society. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the banks were very nearly judenrein, or emptied of Jews, and the census numbers pointed to a steady decline in the Jewish population in the coming decades. It was precisely the survival of Jewish wealth unaccompanied by the exercise of power that made its visibility so intolerable. By way of comparison, consider the reaction someone might have to the image of a well-dressed man or woman applying for welfare: The signs of wealth are still visible–nice coat, expensive shoes, etc.–and they disguise recent financial hardship. Perhaps this person’s business has been ruined, their house has been taken away, their stylish car hides a failing engine. What we see on the outside doesn’t reflect the actual situation: economic ruin clothed in the soon-to-be tattered accoutrements of elegance. Common sense, however, dictates that revolt must stem from opposition to an abuse of power ; ergo, the Jews must have had an excess of it to provoke such violent hatred and be named enemies of the social revolution the Nazis ushered in.
Were the Jews simply scapegoats, the innocent victims chosen from a menu of unlucky peoples? To refuse this refuge to them is not to rationalize the crime done to them, but rather to insist on reviewing the history of their changing and mutually hostile relationship with Gentile society.
A scapegoat originally was an animal burdened with the sins of a people in a magical rite designed to wash clean the conscience of the community. The scapegoat not only is blameless, but incapable of doing wrong. By extension, one might take a person or group and lay the blame for some calamity upon their head regardless of their innocence, thereby absolving others of responsibility for their suffering. But with a history so fraught with common origins, a foundational sectarian division, economic interdependence, and violence both physical and emotional, the Jews hardly fit the contours of the scapegoat.
Their achievements and their tortuous accommodations to their hosts speak to a historical evolution in which the purely innocent actor–the scapegoat–has no part. But it was totalitarian terror which arrived to revive the scapegoat thesis through a wanton and random targeting of the blameless. This was a terror brandished against the obedient masses even after the squashing of political opposition. The Nazis went after groups, notably the Jews, not for what they had done but for who they were. In the Soviet Union (USSR) moreover, victims could be selected from literally any part of society.
The example of the USSR in particular appears to bolster the scapegoat theory of totalitarian terror, since any individual could be branded a public enemy by the state and punished for reasons strategic or arbitrary. However, this judgment overlooks a more complicated truth: By supporting the targeted violence of the Bolshevik revolution, the public became complicit in the apparently random violence and widespread terror meted out by the post-revolution government. Indeed, at the outset, the Bolshevik mission of class warfare secured a popular mandate. Most citizens wanted greater equality and opportunity, and many believed violent means were justified in order to achieve these ends. Thus, they endorsed the pre-state Bolshevik violence aimed at masters who oppressed the working classes. Upon establishing a new government, however, the Bolsheviks expanded their choice of targets and came to wield generalized terror that no longer aligned with their self-proclaimed mission of emancipation. The revolution’s proponents became its casualties.
The German public became convinced that the conspiracy outlined in the Protocols was true, not because the text was especially persuasive but because the terror threatened and then inflicted on Jews retroactively caused them to believe the Jews to be guilty of crimes and therefore worthy of these punishments. The public, cowed by Nazi brutality, found it convenient–perhaps necessary–to believe that the targets of such terror had done something to deserve it. The historian’s task, then, was not to prove the narrative false but to explain how it came to inform a political movement that ascended to national leadership; not to refute a fantasy but to figure out how it came to be an article of faith for millions.
Historians have argued that for centuries Jews were ideal scapegoats. Located within societies while simultaneously standing apart from them in important ways, Jews could be conveniently assigned blame for all manner of problems within the community. This historical simplification had two important effects. First, any antisemitic eruption became “normal,” and indeed, antisemitism itself became a kind of blanket alibi: Religious hatred could be offered as a pretext for any antagonism toward Jews, regardless of what motivations were at play and what was actually at stake in each circumstance. Second, Jews were absolved of responsibility for any deterioration of relations with Gentiles. This deprived Jews of agency and erased the historical and social context of conflict between Jews and Gentiles. Through this obscured lens, it became difficult to view individual instances of conflict as anything other than extensions of a monolithic anti-Jewish bias. Hence, conflict was not attributed to specific dynamics and behaviors that individuals could observe, judge, and modify. Instead, conflict was ascribed to the mere existence of Jews, and Jewishness came to signify an immutable blame-imputing essence.
In reality, the relationship between Jews and Gentiles has been more complicated than the scapegoat theory suggests. Arendt stresses that political antisemitism accompanied assimilation and a withering of religious values among Western Jewry. With the decline of the modern nation-state and the displacement of Jews within the state power structure, a dual threat faced European Jewry: physical extinction from without and dissolution from within.
The modern antisemitism that took root during this period was race-based and vehemently secular in outlook. However, Jews mistook it for the old religiously-based hatred of their kind. Progressive assimilation in European society had attenuated the strength of their religious belief and observance, and the Jewish community was far less close-knit than it had once been. Christianity had formerly declared its dominance through periodic revivals of antisemitic fury that made assimilation efforts unattractive or untenable. Thus, Jews attributed the decline in these episodes and the successes of assimilation to a slackening of Jewish faith, when in fact the decreasing importance of Christian ideology was largely responsible. ?????
For centuries intermittent renewals of religious hatred had ignited the instinct for Jewish self-preservation. Hence, European Jews misidentified modern antisemitism as a resurgence of medieval animosity and responded much in the same way they always had: through a revival of their own cultural traditions. During the 1930s, a Jewish cultural “rebirth” and the reassertion of Jewish identity took place in Germany as a riposte to the Nazi-era Nuremberg Laws which effectively shut Jews out of civic life. This cultural revival, however, did not result in any cohesive and distinctly Jewish political upswell.
Arendt doesn’t quail from addressing the painful question: Why didn’t the Jews see it coming? “It,” of course, was a destructive horror unprecedented in our common history. Although Judeo-Christian belief and ethics have their foundation in Jewish history, Jews nonetheless remained outside of politics for hundreds of years, seemingly the innocent victims of an unending stream of events and actors outside their sphere of influence.
Although the final catastrophe has put to rest the notion that antisemitism somehow catalyzed Jewish cohesion, it has revived the theory of an ‘eternal,’ and thus ‘ordained’ antisemitism whose victims can justifiably point to a single immutable and ahistorical hostility as the source of an unprecedented violation. Both victim and murderer fall prey to a denial of history, the former by refusing to admit of any antagonism, the latter by unlocking an inhumane efficiency unburdened by any personal animus towards a people condemned simply for what they were.
Adolf Eichmann, who rose in the Nazi ranks to become the chief coordinator of the deadly deportations, persistently denied any personal hatred of the Jews. He claimed his motivations in orchestrating the “Final Solution” were neither private nor passionate: He simply had a job to do. This explanation, which omits any driving force beyond the immediate task of “following orders,” leaves the events of the 1930s and 1940s historically and psychologically dislocated: beyond reckoning and therefore beyond blame. Likewise, for assimilated and observant Jews, victimization at the hands of the Nazis seemed unconnected to any possible activity or attitude in which they might have partaken. But, if Jews were merely unwitting victims of brutal atrocities, they were by extension passive objects in a history they had no part in creating, and the reality of Jewish lived experience was a fiction.
Arendt finds these conclusions untenable. Anti-historical narratives that purport to explain the catastrophe, she contends, are fallacious: They pretend to hold the key to history, while ignoring or misusing historical fact. They are, then, examples of modern sophistry. In Ancient Greece, Sophists relied on specious but persuasive rhetoric and distortions of the truth in order to win arguments. They placed greater value on oratory (skill) than on truth, and openly bragged of their ability to defend any position, whether or not it was good, true, or worthy of belief. Today’s sophists, however, prevail only through a blunt denial of reality. Lacking both the skill and conviction of Ancient Sophists, they claim to report truth while relying on obliterations of truth, parading their anti-historical narratives as history.
Arendt thus insists that the “indestructible essences” of the players that populate these narratives–be they the “commercial mindset” of the Jew, or the “blind obedience” of the Teutonic masses–must be recognized as ideological facades and roundly abandoned. In so doing, we may begin to discern the actual contours of history and to understand how the rise and triumph of antisemitic parties were prepared by the eclipse of all other -isms in the court of public opinion.
If antisemitism as a legitimate politics could mobilize vast numbers against both the state and the Jews, then the role the Jews had played vis-à-vis the state becomes crucially relevant. As modern capitalist society continued to take shape, and as the European nation-state struggled to define its role in the new social order, a mob of individuals sprung loose from any class identification found themselves rootless and ripe for identification with a cause. The mob was characterized by its egalitarianism and refusal to acknowledge stodgy, outmoded class barriers, but otherwise lacked common purpose, shared values, and concrete goals. With surplus energy and a paucity of aims, Nazi leaders thus found the mob easy to steer. A notable example of the mob’s influence in society, the Dreyfus Affair, grimly previewed, in its panoply of actors who seemed to swim against the tide of nineteenth-century progress, much of what was to follow.
The ease with which leaders of the mob convinced it of Jewish responsibility for all evils raises the ever crucial question–Why the Jews?–and forces us to confront the history of the Jewish people and European nation-states. That many of the Nazi restrictions limiting and banning Jewish agency were to be found in Ancient Roman and medieval statutes might convince one of the time-honored applicability, even banality, of antisemitism as a political force. Doubtless, the framers of the new Germany counted on the supposedly ever-recurrent element when building support for their legislation. While true, this explanation remains insufficient. To understand the forces that led up to the Final Solution, we must continue to probe modern antisemitism and its nineteenth- and twentieth-century adherents as unique historical and political phenomena, rather than variations on an ancient theme.
Chapter Two: The Jews, the Nation-State, and the Birth of Antisemitism
I) The Equivocalities of Emancipation and the Jewish State Banker
As a people, the Jews did not share the nationality (both in terms of objective national origin and subjective national self-identification) of European peoples with whom they sought political equality through legal emancipation. They also lacked many of the traits that characterized European Gentiles and which stemmed from a cultural heritage and forms of civic participation that were alien to the Jewish community. Historically, the equality of rights is most often tied to a similarity of condition. This was certainly true of the New Englanders who forged the democratic ideal of the United States: Most were small landowners of Protestant faith and of English origin, united as much by their shared heritage as by their common political aims. Americans eventually built a unified sense of national identity on the basis of shared values alone; hence, to be an American meant to uphold such virtues as working hard, honoring one’s family, and fighting for one’s country. Anyone could champion American values, and thus share in the American dream. Assimilation–sharing an American identity–was possible for people from myriad backgrounds, and so, too, was equality before the law.
The first Jews to be granted legal equality were those of Revolutionary France, who until then had constituted a “nation within the nation” with certain obligations and privileges conferred by a royal system of estates that favored the nobility and the clergy. All such exceptions were swept away in the rush toward a perfectly egalitarian polity. The push for Jewish emancipation coincided with the Jacobin demand for a dismantling of social hierarchies and establishment of equality in the new French Republic. Jewish emancipation was thus preceded by the establishment of an overarching state power that claimed to represent the nation as a whole and espoused a national ideal of total uniformity.
The newly minted governments sought to increase the power and legitimacy of the state, conceived as an impersonal bureaucracy independent of the influence of individual nobles and their interests. To achieve this, officials aimed at curtailing the power of the nobility by expanding the economic function of the state. They came naturally to rely on the financial expertise of Jews already under the trust of nobles. These “court Jews” were to compose a separate group unassimilated within gentile society, yet often favored over Christian businessmen, who were averse to the risks and initiatives mercantilism imposed. As long as the state relied on the business acumen of court Jews, it had a vested interest in providing them with protection and privileges, including residence and commissions. Court Jews thus occupied a unique position in society that was defined by their relationship to the state, rather than their belonging to any particular social class.
Eventually, the small Jewish elite was unable to handle the burgeoning state business. Gentiles increasingly performed this function, and court Jews were no longer distinguished through exclusive occupation of this role. The state no longer had a reason to provide privileges and recognition that designated Jewish difference and prevented Jewish assimilation. Jewish emancipation, then, resulted principally from the need to iron out all political and legal inequalities in the new republican state; it also represented a gradual extension of privileges previously granted to well-to-do persons who were useful to the state. Jewish emancipation thus arose from an array of contradictions. These tensions include: the new state’s commitment to equality for all and its previous lavishing of privileges on the few; the Enlightenment-era commitment to abolishing special rights for the few while extending these rights to the masses; the phasing out of Jewish communal autonomy and the erection of a conscious social distance from the Jews.
Once every Frenchman was but a citizen among citizens the aristocracy lost both its hold on government and its obligation to protect the oppressed. With its eclipse came a system of national separation based on class. The French Revolution’s promise of equality made one equal only before the law, that is, as an abstract political subject. Social equality, a real equality of condition, was approximated only in North America, where class distinctions were far less salient since the large population of northern yeomen farmers (modest, titleless landholders) enjoyed comparable degrees of comfort and influence. By contrast, in Europe there was a built-in conflict between the political equality granted and the evident inequalities embedded in social class. Bridging these divisions and unifying a developing republic became an ever-present frustration–indeed, one that gave rise to the cry of, “Workers of the world, unite!,” which aimed at convincing workers in different countries that they had more in common with each other than with their richer co-citizens. Against a backdrop of fierce transnational proletarian organizing World War I provided a bloody reconfirmation of national identity. While this had the effect of temporarily relaxing class hierarchies in some areas, changes were short lived, and class consciousness remained integral to the European social fabric.
But Jews weren’t part of the class system. The “keeping up with the Joneses” style intra-class competition and the inter-class hierarchy that shaped much of European politics had little relevance within Jewish communities. Jews were counted among neither workers nor peasants, neither landholders nor the middle class, and they became white-collar employers only in their last Act in Europe. The very protections the state extended to them, including formal equality through emancipation decrees, served to exclude them from the class system. When actually visible in society it was as aristocrats or members of the bourgeoisie.
The class system that defined workers, the petty bourgeoisie (clerks, teachers), landed gentry, and peasants in relation to one another excluded Jews and the unique position they occupied. This was due to a state interest in keeping Jews apart from the rest of society. As evidence of this, Arendt points to the Rothschild family as a key example. Although the Rothschilds played an essential role in the development of the modern nation-state by launching state loans, they did not expand into the private sector by attempting to create great industries. Capitalist development involves more social integration than does the discrete dealing with government alone. When equality before the law came to influence social norms, assimilation in general society and thus inclusion in the class system tended to follow. States that could prevent this assimilation could thereby monopolize the financial talents of the socially-dislocated Jews.
To be a Jew in society was to be either over- or under-privileged: One was either a highly prized financier, enjoying the special protection of the powers-that-be, or a social outcast without rights and opportunities, helpless in the face of the intermittent xenophobic violence.
Four stages mark the relation between Jews and European nation-states:
1) Seventeenth century–eighteenth century: Absolute monarchs grant individual Jews immense influence as court Jews while neglecting all others
2) Late eighteenth century–mid-nineteenth century: Rights are extended to a larger class of wealthy Jews who are able to pool their money to provide capital to the post-Revolutionary nation-state; full emancipation is then extended to Western and Central European Jews except in nations where this Jewish capital is absent
3) Mid-nineteenth century–early twentieth century: Nation-states commit to imperialist projects abroad, which promise to enrich bourgeois financiers who stake these ventures; Jews that manage to retain economic clout despite their fading legacy as politically influential court Jews are among those who bankroll European imperialism. The “wealth without function” paradigm emerges, fueling antisemitic stereotypes.
4) Early twentieth century onward: Post-WWI the European comity of nations has disintegrated, while imperialist expansion has enriched nation-states, rendering future Jewish funding insignificant. The pan-national Jew, once a valuable go-between in diplomatic circles, is perceived as a mere parasite bereft of either power or function and detested for his useless wealth; thus, Jews are “atomized into a herd of wealthy individuals.”
The early kings of Europe got their money through war and looting. They subsequently protected and increased their wealth through exercise of a tax monopoly that usurped the power of the nobility, leading to their opposition. This operated in the following way: The king collected taxes into his own treasury and then doled them out to the nobility instead of allowing local lieges to levy and collect taxes within their own fiefdoms.
After alienating the loyalty of nobles the king needed to replace their support. He had two options for achieving this: i) expanding the economic principles of Mercantilism, which gave greater control over the economy to the state, thereby recasting the feudal order, or ii) relying explicitly on the financial services provided by court Jews in exchange for privileges. In the end, most European nations opted for a combination of these. Jewish financiers reached the apex of their power in the eighteenth century as the state expanded its economic function and engaged Jewish capital in projects that were unattractive to bourgeois investors.
By the era’s end it was clear that no other class was going to supplant the nobility as the ruling class and that the ideal of the nation-state would take its place above all classes and social groups as the premier representative of the nation as a whole. But, in a development that puzzled champions of equality, the new Jewish elite opposed the extension of enfranchisement to their less cosmopolitan fellow Jews from the East. Jewish financiers had come to compose a new class and jealously guarded the rights granted and the magnificent status they enjoyed within the Jewish community. In short, they had left the village, or shtetl, behind to live and socialize among the dominant elites, and this marked privilege made them the benefactors and prime ambassadors of ordinary Jews still constricted by age-old laws limiting their residence and occupations. They had “crossed over”–with all the showy pomp and lurking ambiguity this transition entails.
What enticed the bourgeois class–the bankers and investors with ready capital–to invest in state projects? The new imperial projects were underwritten by military force and a government monopoly, which together made the junction of plunder and development a very profitable
affair. The advent of government bonds, wherein the citizen effectively loans the state money for a fixed period of time at a fixed rate of return, ensured the economic eclipse of Jewish capital but did not wholly erase Jewish influence within the state. The inter-European position of the Jews allowed them to play an important role as mediators in times of national conflict and war. Indeed, the financial network established by Meyer Rothschild and his sons across Europe presaged this crucial diplomatic role.
Ia) The Rise of the Jews
Four developments prepared the advent of Jewish influence in Europe:
1) In the late Middle Ages the Jewish moneylender lost his former status.
2) In the early sixteenth century the Jews were expelled to the countryside. (WHERE EXACTLY ??)
3) In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years War favored the now far-flung Jews as provisioners; every princely feudal household needed the equivalent of a court Jew, whose purely localized services meant they remained personal servants. For this reason, Jews and their relationship to Gentile society were precluded from becoming a more important topic of political discussion.
4) In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the feudal lord became a prince or king, the role of the Jews was enlarged as well. Even when services included supplying an army such a politically charged mission remained a purely business arrangement for the Jewish partner. This business arrangement tying Jews to the aristocracy was unique in the way that it visibly joined Jewish interests to those of another social class. It disappeared in the wake of the French Revolution, but this did not deter a liberal brand of antisemitism from lumping Jews and nobility together in an anti-bourgeois stance. Its plausibility derived from court Jews’ penchant for royal titles and a status anxiety they shared with a declining aristocracy.
The importance of Jews in transnational diplomacy was fostered within a geopolitical framework known as a “comity of nations.” The doctrine of international comity was intended, among other things, to prevent individual nations from exerting undue international influence and to limit the scope of multinational wars. In order to adjudicate between the interests of individual nations and successfully limit their power, it was necessary to enlist the aid of mediators who did not harbor loyalties that would bias the outcome of negotiations. Jews, the only non-national European people, were ideal candidates for this role. In addition, they were the group most threatened by the systemic collapse of nation-states, and thus had a vested interest in maintaining international peace.
The role that Jews played in negotiating peace between France and Germany in 1871 cemented their importance in transnational diplomacy. However, this position of importance declined during negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles (1919–1920), which ended WWI. Walther Rathenau, a German statesman and Jew, was instrumental in securing peace, but it came at a price. Germany was saddled with hefty reparations. In Germany this bred resentment against Jews and foreign nations and undermined the very stability that the end of armed conflict was intended to ensure.
Arendt points to a paradox central to Jewish political history: They alone among peoples had been stateless and were in no position to be selective when seeking or accepting the protection of others. Politically inexperienced and vulnerable, they turned a blind eye to ongoing conflict between the state and society. And, if forced to align with either party, their allegiance was to the state. Historically, the state, run by elites, had protected Jews. In medieval times, for example, the state had allowed them communal autonomy and safety from gentile interference in exchange for tax money. In its absolutist majesty, the state had no obligation to recognize public grievance; thus, in exchange for financial services, court Jews enjoyed insulation from popular discontent and more aggressive expressions of antisemitism. By contrast, Jews distrusted the public, whose populist campaigns could turn into costly and bloody pogroms.
But the confidence Jews had in officialdom left them ill-prepared to understand and contend with the danger of a state-sponsored antisemitism. An ancient strategy of survival obliged Jews to realign their loyalties as circumstances dictated rather than to resort to an amoral and opportunistic play for global power and influence, as was attributed to them by rabble-rousers. Even a serious historian such as J.H. Hobson could confidently assert that no war could be fought without the say-so of the Rothschilds, since they controlled funding. Such narratives exaggerated the political maneuvering of prominent Jews who, of course, answered to gentile statesmen responsible for making such decisions. It was true, however, that this banking family didn’t play favorites among governments or align themselves with the ideology and interests of any particular nation; instead, they fixed their loyalty on government–on authority– and indiscriminately financed projects undertaken by these authorities.
As imperial powers in the late nineteenth century ushered in a period of globalization (succeeding that of the early discoveries and conquests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the collusion of private and state power stymied the telling of any reliable account of politically-charged events. With all of the confusion, it was easy to place Jews at the center of these conflicts and reframe them as key participants in a broader conspiracy for world domination. In their distaste for political activity which might distance them from the protection of the state, Jews couldn’t recognize when social discrimination turned into a political argument. They were all too aware of the social stigmatization that accompanied emancipation, but did not expect to be identified as bad actors involved in international political machinations.
Protected by the state, owing all privileges to the state, Jews become identified with it, such that any and all anti-state groups also became ipso facto antisemitic, preparing society as a whole to follow suit. In this way, social discrimination resulting from the age-old biases of ordinary people changed into a political position that was eventually endorsed by those in power. The historical record thus supports Arendt’s claim that the relatively minor question of Jewish political influence can drive a movement only by being hitched to an issue with much wider appeal–in this case, opposition to state power. (As further evidence of this, Arendt notes that German wage-workers, proletarians, were immune to antisemitism precisely because their conflict was not with the state, but with the bourgeoisie.)
The Rothschild family and other prominent Jewish financiers in particular presented a target for both antisemitic and anti-state ire. The Rothschilds’s evolution from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries coincided with an evolution in the position of Jewish financiers generally in Western and Central Europe: from a handful of loose connections to a highly organized financial network. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Rothschild bankers had gained positions of prominence in five major European capitals: Paris, London, Vienna, Frankfort, and Naples.
The establishment of an international banking network allowed inter-European court Jews who had operated as financiers across the continent to retain the advantages that emancipation threatened to erase. Families such as the Rothschilds thus maintained their wealth and status (to the envy of others) even while other Jews gained access to basic rights.
The Rothschild fortune was born in Frankfort (a city with a 10 percent Jewish population) and developed under the rule of the emperor in Vienna. It continued to grow when the family entered big business as middlemen for the British funding of the royalist coalition against Bonaparte. Eventually, they came to dominate all state funding in the rebuilding of the Holy Alliance and the restructuring of financial bodies along the lines of the Bank of England. At this point, the entire mass of Jewish capital, in particular, that supplied by the inter-European Rothschilds, was earmarked by world leaders to feed a mighty financial machine in the issuance of state loans.
Here, Arendt puts her finger on a crucial fact: The reality of an international bank run by a Jewish family gave greater plausibility to the fantasy of a Jewish world government than any propaganda could. When the Nazis turned race into a pivotal political issue, the blood and family ties woven into the Rothschild saga and hallowed during centuries of persecution provided powerful ammunition. In the face of racially-based hostility, assimilation, and dissolution, Jews, fearing for their identity, looked to family for support, and the Jewish community came to see itself as one big family.
A rising antisemitism in the nineteenth century stemmed from an antagonism the disaffected felt toward their own governments. This antagonism eventually latched onto Jews due to distorted views of prominent Jewish financiers that led to false assumptions about the Jewish people. Accordingly, certain misconceptions became common: that Jews were part of an international trade organization and everywhere shared identical interests; that Jews harnessed a secret power to pull the strings of governments to secure their interests; and that Jews were a clannish people who cared only about their own.
II) Early Antisemitism
In many Western and Central European countries antisemitism gained traction by piggybacking on a political issue with greater resonance or applicability to the majority of the population. In other cases antisemitism gathered momentum when Jews were pitted against a particular social class. This was true in Poland, where Jews had historically occupied visible roles in society as land agents and tax collectors, making them middlemen between nobility and peasants for centuries. As Jews increasingly adopted other roles as well, such as trader and shopkeeper, they began to develop as a community into a middle class. Unlike middle class Gentiles, however, they effected this transformation without functioning as agents of capitalist development–that is, without helping to invest in and build industries that could increase the economic might of the nation and employ its workers.
Jews, as neither buyers nor sellers of labor power, didn’t enter into the drama of class struggle in a significant way. This accounts for the very negligible impact of rising antisemitism on the German labor movement and also explains why Karl Marx largely ignored the unique status of Jews when penning his seminal theory of European socioeconomics. (Arendt discounts the “antisemitism” that critics have attributed to Marx based on his early writings, noting that these critiques, in line with the broader arguments later proposed in das Kapital, were socioeconomic rather than cultural in nature.)
Because of their unique relationship to class hierarchy, from an outsider’s point of view, Jews had position without a socially productive function. Their uncontested place in the static economy was the symptom of a feudal system that prevented the formation of a normal middle class: Without land reform there was no avenue by which the sons of the peasantry could aspire to middle class status, and consequently, Jews, as the middling players in the system, were seen as a primary obstacle to upward social mobility.
In Poland, it was the petty bourgeois who snapped up government bonds and made their modest savings available to investment bankers. The nobility and landed gentry had nothing to fear from any possible government redistribution of spoils favoring a middle class, and the job of squeezing ever more tax revenues from the peasantry fell to Jewish middlemen. Since they occupied the next rung on the social ladder, and since peasants blamed them for their own inability to attain greater status and prosperity, Jews could easily be portrayed as an “enemy of the people.” In Eastern Europe, hatred of the Jews was ever-present and diffuse enough that it couldn’t be wielded for specific purposes. But in both regions the appearance of an alignment of Jewish and state interests was enough to stoke resentment and distrust.
Antisemitism took root in the Prussian capital, Berlin following the defeat by Napoleon in 1807. This was due to a combination of social and intellectual developments that led to the restructuring of Prussian society. The first force responsible for reshaping Prussia was eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy, which i) offered a rational and moral foundation for the formation of a neutral civil service that prioritized equality and reason above all other values, and ii) fueled the genuine sympathy Prussian reformers felt for Jews, who had long suffered from social inequality. Ironically, sympathy for the plight of Jews was distorted by the second development: the post-defeat loss of privileges for the nobility, which allowed the middle classes to develop. This move toward a more egalitarian social order bred myriad resentments that cut across class and cultural lines: of powerful Jews against less influential Jews; of lower, middle, and upper class Gentiles against members of other classes and against the state; and of lower, middle, and upper class Gentiles against Jews.
Emancipation, which formally extended rights to Jews, merely legalized the status quo already enjoyed by well-off Jews; but the appearance of Jewish social ascension provoked the anger of lower class Gentiles, who resented Jewish success, and of liberal reformers, who misconstrued political enfranchisement as the provision of privileges. The “liberals” espousing this narrative were all too aware of the similarities between noble and Jewish families: Both were seen as clannish, international, and family-oriented, in contrast to the individualism of the bourgeoisie. The foundations of personal identity for Jews and the nobility–birth, heritage, and family–were seen as antithetical to the empowerment of the middle class. Perhaps, it was argued, the key to combating the nobility and thus to achieving social equality lay in getting rid of the Jews.
Due to tangled relations going back to feudal times, when the small but indispensable moneylender had bankrolled noble indulgences, it was in fact aristocrats who led the antisemitic charge against the “new-fangled Jew-state.” They did so by capitalizing on the public’s perception of Jewish betrayal in exchange for privilege, maintaining that “their Jews” had turned against them in order to enjoy advantages extended by a government intent on crushing aristocratic status while enfranchising those Jews whose protection and patronage these very nobles had once provided.
While the antisemitism of the lower classes arose due to a perception that Jews were the beneficiaries of unfair privilege, the aristocracy’s antisemitism was a reaction to egalitarian Bonapartist reforms that were later undone by the Congress of Vienna. Aristocrats, however, found success in advancing their agenda–i.e. challenging the bureaucratic power of the nation-state, which had supplanted nobles as the primary governing authority–and gained support from the general public by promoting a narrative that emphasized the collusion between a corrupt state and privilege-seeking Jews. Enfranchisement, they argued, was itself the worst sort of inequality.
Meanwhile, the aristocracy aspired to restore a social system based on structural inequality and a legalized bifurcation of the Jewish polity. Within this system would be recognized differences between those Jews who were useful to aristocrats (e.g. the bankers) and those who were not (e.g. the intelligentsia).
Under Bismarck only a revolutionary dreamer would have imagined enfranchising the poor Jews newly-arrived from the restored provinces to the east. Emancipation was thus alarming to both the aristocracy, who saw their hegemony corrode with each right extended to those of lower social status, and to the well-off Jews whose status was based on enjoying rights and freedoms denied to other Jews. Gentiles from every stratum of society found a reason to be suspicious of the relationship between Jews and the state, and powerful Jews were equally suspicious of the state’s newfound commitment to Jewish emancipation and equality. Conservatives could bemoan the erosion of their status as rights were democratically extended to “inferior” types, while radicals could attack the antidemocratic bestowal of privilege. And both groups could come together in hatred of Jews, who, it was claimed, represented a “state within the state” and a “nation within the nation,” which threatened to undermine good governance and civic virtues.
In response to rampant distrust, Jews doubled down on their great political liability: their loyalty to the state. This, in turn, increased the apprehension and anger Gentiles felt towards them.
III) The First Antisemitic Parties
Antisemitic politics was catalyzed by the endemic swindles in France under the Third Empire. The lower and middle classes suffered catastrophic losses in the Panama affair, one swindle among many in which an overabundance of capital came into play. Although Jews acted as some of the middlemen in these swindles, not one Jewish banking house made a fortune from them. Like the craft guilds, this sector was now subject to the Manchester System, an anti-protectionist economic policy that gutted home industries during the era of Jewish emancipation. As capitalist expansion threatened the small properties of the petite bourgeoisie, they fell for schemes they hoped would catapult them into the bourgeoisie, an investment sector with both income and discretionary savings, or money to play with. Failing to achieve this, they were liable to fall into the proletariat, joining the ever expanding class of wage-slaves.
The Manchester System embodied the free trade markets now open to Jews, and so the hapless, unprotected heirs to an outmoded post-feudalism turned against them. The typical petit bourgeois, such as a small shop-keeper, was now obliged to turn to usurious minor bankers to forestall utter ruin. These small-fry bankers were not part of the machinery of state loans; nor did they bank-roll small businesses; nor, indeed, did have anything resembling the kind of working relationship with store owners that manufacturers had with workers. Instead, they existed outside of the nexus of production and represented a mere stopgap on the path to ruin.
The first antisemitic parties pretended to represent the nation as “parties above parties”; they aimed at exclusive power, at taking over the state machinery, and at replacing the state altogether. The state had come to represent the nation as a whole, and state institutions gained tremendous power when groups who had previously ruled, such as insular noble families, were displaced by democratic reform and no individual social group could take their place and seize the reins of power. The idea of an abstract universal citizenry replacing the estates of the Middle Ages (the nobility, church, and guilds) appealed to leftists, who acceded to the government’s authority, especially in foreign affairs. Their quarrel was with the bourgeoisie; hence, they did not harbor resentment against the state as such and were eager to see the new government succeed.
The antisemitic new parties were keen on foreign affairs. They recognized the opportunity offered by the increasingly complex and murky intrigues connected to European imperialism and could spin events to their liking, masterfully convincing the public that opponents of the party were enemies of the people, all while pretending to represent the national interest rather than the narrow interests of any one class. This ability to manipulate the public discourse around global events allowed them to gain the people’s trust and not only promote a particular political agenda but authoritatively determine what the truth was. The truth, they asserted, was that a Jewish cabal was running things world-wide. In addition to ‘diagnosing’ this problem, the parties assured the public that they could offer a “cure.” They, too, could influence the trajectory of world events–in the interests of the people, of course. And so they pushed a domestic program calculated to appear as revolutionary as the workers’ movement. As the working classes came to identify with one another across national lines (due to shared class-based, socioeconomic interests and goals), antisemitic parties began explicitly addressing international politics, maintaining that foreign affairs held the key to all manner of domestic problems. Foreign affairs were framed as a legitimate concern for the nation as a whole, and the key actors involved in these affairs were naturally subject to suspicion; parties pretending to speak for the nation and to fight for the national interest on the global stage naturally zeroed in on the Jews as perennial transnational players.
The politics of the era are damnably difficult to parse, but the outlines are thus: Behind a veil of hyper-nationalism the antisemites proposed a tribal supranationalism in order to open a breach in the modest, narrow structures of the nation-state and its sovereignty. They did so according to the logic that if international Jewish capital could subvert the economic foundation of entire classes while the nation-state sat idly on its hands, then why couldn’t their party take aim at the nation-state as well? To the socialists the “Jewish question” was a distraction from the mission of class struggle. However, for individuals of nearly every other political persuasion and members of every class antisemitism could gain exceptional force when connected to broader economic and political themes. By the time the Jewish question arrived center stage it had already been taken over by the supranationalist antisemitic parties who had artfully codified a popular narrative regarding the relationship between Jews, the state, and international finance. Once financial scandals such as the Panama Affair had run their course, overt expressions of antisemitism went below the radar; there was little to hint at the eventual reemergence of widespread anti-Jewish sentiment like that cultivated by early twentieth-century political movements.
To sum up: The capitalist expansion in free trade whereby home industries would no longer benefit from protectionist tariffs on foreign goods and commodities hit the petty bourgeoisie hardest, making them debtors to small-time Jewish bankers who were unconnected to global investment. The new parties built on the resentments of those left out of capitalist expansion by reinforcing the notion that the state had been prioritizing transnational investment over domestic interests and vowing to reverse these policies. They then zeroed in on the transnationality of Jewish identity as the key to understanding the economic upheavals embodied in the many corrupt deals that–not incidentally–had bankrupted many a small investor of the petty bourgeoisie who had been anxious not to fall into the ranks of the proletariat. The high profile of the Jewish Rothschild family was practically made-to-order for the antisemitic propaganda of the new parties and instrumental in promoting the popularity and perceived credibility of their movements.
IV) Leftist Antisemitism
Antisemitism was articulated most effectively in Austria for nowhere else had Jews rendered such great services to the state. The mixed peoples of the dual monarchy didn’t fit the profile of the nation-state; nevertheless, the rulers were tasked with devising a constitution and a civil service. As a constitutional state began to take shape, ethnic groups began divvying up power on the ground in order to establish themselves as well-positioned and privileged players within the new social structure. Hungarians represented in large part the landed gentry of the nation, and Germans were the largest demographic and dominant group overall in terms of language, national origin, and cultural heritage (religious tradition, social norms, etc.). Jews were a group set apart from the rest of society yet identified with the monarchy, much as the Rothschild fortune was identified with the credit of the state. Everybody had some kind of beef with the state; thus, the association of Jews and the state naturally engendered antisemitic attitudes among members of every community and social class.
The financial crash of 1873 triggered an economic depression that spread from its epicenter in the major financial institutions of Vienna throughout Europe and North America. The anti-state resentment of hard-hit workers was reignited by the economic downturn, and following a familiar pattern, was leveled against the Jews, culminating in a student-led lower-middle class attack on the Rothschilds. The leader of this openly antisemitic movement, Georg Ritter von Schoenerer, knew that economic instability and social unrest provided an easy way to appeal to and promote pan-Germanism, an ideological whiff of the Nazism to come much later.
Pan-Germanism as an ideology and movement rates barely a footnote in current histories of Nazi Germany; nonetheless, its influence is unmistakable. According to Pan-Germanist dogma, nationhood was something independent of state and territory. The movement aimed at redefining national communities in terms of something beyond regional hegemony, organizing their platform around an ideal of a connected people transcending state borders based on a highly racialized and romanticized vision of Teutonic greatness. To champion this movement, Schoenerer recognized the strategic value of demonizing its enemies, and the global economic crises of the 1870s provided a fortuitous pretext for doing so.
The Rothschild family had been involved in the development of railways around the world since the 1830s, greatly increasing their personal fortune and advancing the interests of big business who relied on rapidly-expanding transportation infrastructure to grow their markets and increase the efficiency and speed with which they reached them. The Rothschilds had had a controlling interest in Austrian railways since 1836, the license for which was set to expire in 1886. Harnessing the anti-state and anti-Jewish sentiment generated by the economic depression, Schoenerer and supporters of the German Liberal Party gathered 40,000 signatures protesting the contract’s renewal, effectively reinforcing the identification between Jews and the state and publicly blaming Jews for the economic challenges plaguing society.
Schoenerer’s Pan-Germanist movement gained support in rural communities that tended to be insular and traditional. These provinces were home to very few Jews, and the abstract notion of “the Jew” was readily identifiable with the invisible and far-removed bureaucracy of state power. Many inhabitants of these areas were peasants who had been exceptions to the rule of universal prosperity and upward social mobility that had benefited many Austrians during the pre-WWI period. Pan-Germanism allowed them to overcome this sense of individual defeat and national disunity. It denied that nationality was based on territory and state, promoted open loyalty to Bismarck’s Reich, and supported an imperialist ideology: Austrian Pan-Germanists wanted to dominate all of Central Europe, create a German-ruled empire, and relegate all other peoples to a state of semiservitude resembling the condition that Slavic peoples already endured in Austria. Although popular among the disaffected, this ideology had little resonance with other social groups in Austria.
The other antisemitic party, the Christian-Socials, were more allied with reactionary conservative forces and more inclined to push for social concessions than systemic overhaul or disruption of existing institutions. Even when Karl Lueger, their leader, became mayor of Vienna, their antisemitism did not become a central issue of their platform and did not translate into anti-statism as it had within other movements. This was for the following reasons: i) Their sentiments toward Jews were ambivalent–they were at once friendly towards Jewish businessmen and hostile towards Jewish intellectuals; ii) since the ruling aristocrats, the Hapsburgs, were of German origin, the Christian-Socials never attacked the monarchy as the antisemites in France had attacked the Third Republic; and iii) their goal was to win the votes of German nationals in support of a government that was otherwise very unpopular with this population–antisemitism, while a convenient rallying cry for achieving this particular end, was not integral to the party’s vision of governance.
While antisemitism continued to appeal to various groups in Austria and Germany through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the same cannot be said of France. French antisemitism reached a premature climax during the Dreyfus Affair. Though it gathered elements proper to sowing destruction–indeed, proper to the Nazi catastrophe to come–these elements came out of the conflict between the rights-seeking people and the power of nation-state and they did little to bolster or legitimize Nazi ideology, even when antisemitism had been fully expressed under the Vichy regime collaborating with the Reich. French antisemites had no desire to foment a movement that considered itself to be above the French state.
French antisemitism predated the antisemitic movements of other countries, much as Jewish emancipation had. The reformist zeal of France’s radically secular Enlightenment thinkers had taxed Jews with having practiced a backward, feudal cult allied with the aristocracy. The Church and the nobility had joined their voices to the chorus by accusing the government of having colluded with Jews in the sale of Church property during the Revolution. The left was firmly anti-clerical in the widest sense–and thus anti-Jewish–and only parted company with other antisemitic groups during the Dreyfus Affair.
The influx of Alsatian Jews involved in money-lending post-1870 also stoked the leftist animus, as did the alliance between the Rothschilds and conservative governments. Toussenel's Les Juifs, rois de l'époque was a popular expression of petit bourgeois resentment that mistakenly took the figure of the Jewish banker for a central player in the capitalist system. The pan-European discrimination against Eastern Jews is echoed in xenophobic actions practiced against the Alsatian and German Jews in France, which found a perfect target in the Rothschilds, who hailed from Alsace-Lorraine.
Arendt is careful to debunk the “nation-worship” of the Nazis: A nation is limited in so many ways–by physical territory, legal jurisdiction, and cultural influence over its citizenry. The Nazis, however, refused to accept these limitations, instead seeking to destroy the nation-state and replace it with the party as a unilateral ruling force. Given this worldview, they had little use for the nationalist antisemitism of the Vichy “patriots.”
Arendt includes the profile of a French writer so rabidly antisemitic that even the Germans quailed from exploiting him: Louis Ferdinand Céline alone was willing to advocate a total, indiscriminate war on Jewry. According to him, they had single-handedly prevented European unity, had provoked every European war for centuries, and were the agents behind Franco-German hostility. Arendt rounds out the portrait of French antisemitism by noting that the hostility toward Germany fueled much of its force and popularity. French antisemites had no basic feud with the state as such; France, in Arendt’s estimation, was the “nation par excellence,” which compromised its imperial ambitions in a variety of ways. Allying with Germany against England in the imperialist scramble for Africa would have been a step too far, and the brutal destruction of the French state by the Nazis that was to come made a mockery of any such alliance.
In sum, the Jews of Austro-Hungary became targets in an empire dominated by people of German origin, an empire unable and unwilling to meet the demands of a heterogeneous polity, which then trained its animus on the only group that had historically identified with the state: Jews. Pan-Germanism arose out of this morass of dissatisfaction and constructed an ideology of racial domination eerily predictive of Nazi ideology. French antisemitism could not leverage any anti-national sentiment in the “nation par excellence,” despite the virulence of rightwing provocateurs who stoked anti-state resentment during the Dreyfus affair. In this regard, antisemitism was a nationalist ideology inasmuch as it focused its animus on the perceived Jewish interlopers from Alsace-Lorraine, the province lost in the 1870 defeat to Prussia. While some prominent Nazis saluted the antisemitism of the French, their national loyalties were ultimately a bad fit with the supranational ideology of the Reich.
V) The Golden Age of Security
Only 20 years separated the initial outbreaks of political antisemitism from the start of WWI. Despite the tottering governments and despotisms, economic expansion had trumped whatever political questions arose. Economic capacity became synonymous with power, and the notion that international cooperation through trade would preclude a world war was soon put to rest in 1914.
As a result of the newfound focus on economic might, the political sphere, and specifically the nation-state, suffered a loss of prestige. For Jews, who had long been identified with the state and consequently vilified, the erosion of state influence was a Janus-faced development in society: On the one hand, the Jews’ strongest protector had been severely weakened; on the other hand, Jews were no longer emphatically and relentlessly accused of colluding with the state to subvert the interests of the people. Jewish banks were no longer capable of centralizing Jewish wealth, and many Jews left state finance for private business, in which their experience as provisioners to armies made them able dealers in grain , garments and general goods . Their departure from the public sector wasn’t wholesale: A few major financiers continued to service the government but with little connection to the Jewish middle class and in diminished roles that did not inspire widespread populist rage.
What did transpire was the growth of the Jewish intelligentsia so unwelcome in times past. The offspring of Jewish merchants and bankers chose to go into the arts and other professions (notably, the theater and publishing) that were highly visible and put them into contact with the thought leaders and cultural trailblazers of the day. To hold these positions social integration was necessary: Jews had to appear both as exceptional, well-connected figures and as entirely ordinary, assimilated members of an international citizenry of the enlightened. An inability to satisfy these contradictory demands inevitably promised social discrimination in some form.
The Jewish intelligentsia gained prominence in the world of images and thus the public view, and their disregard for money and power made them symbols of a society closed to everyday people. Now that antisemitism was no longer grounded in the social and economic conditions that had spawned popular movements in the nineteenth century it became the plaything of charlatans and crackpots peddling the half-truths, superstitions, and conspiracies that emerged after 1914.
As Jewish capital receded into the background due to the public funding of capitalist expansion through bonds, Jews themselves became more–not less–visible because of their increasing representation in cultural institutions, law, consumer goods, medicine, the arts, and publishing. The inequalities spawned by globalism created resentments among Gentiles who had been left behind, and they saw the now elevated Jews as symbols of a society that ignored their needs. The secular, assimilated Jewry intent on creating a universalist, international cultural vision could then be framed, once again, as agents in a conspiracy. Accordingly, contemporary antisemites claimed Jews were disguising their ethnicity while devising fantastic schemes of world domination, and cultural institutions rather than state instutions became the primary object of antisemitic preoccupation.
Chapter Three: The Jews and Society
In this section Arendt examines in some detail a phenomenon both crucial to an understanding of antisemitism in Western and Central Europe and conspicuously peculiar to its time. It concerns how the social abstraction of “the Jew” came into being. Remember that the Nazi revolution was social in character: The Nazis wanted an end to politics as such; following their takeover of the state, the Volk, a social body excluding Jews (and other undesirables), would reign supreme. Thus, the conflict between society and state would be resolved in favor of society. Instead of a feudal order governed by strict social boundaries of birth and caste, and instead of a national order based on an equality of rights, where social inequalities in fact stood in starker relief than ever before, the Nazis aimed to create a state that would function as a vast family. This “family,” the Volk–a concept aptly captured by the phrase “unter uns”, or “just us”–would erase class distinctions, approximating equality by embracing uniformity.
Arendt very rightly addresses the social aspect of antisemitism. Her sensitivity to the finest nuances of Jewish identity as conceived either by Jews or Gentiles derived from her own upbringing in an assimilated Jewish family, her painful dislocation and quest to define her identity in the 1930s, and her immersion in the life of Rahel Varnhagen, the cosmopolitan German Jewess who presided over a Berlin salon that crystalized the nascent forces of liberal inclusion and Enlightenment-era reverence for reason.
Emancipation incurred two distinct reactions: On a political level antisemites condemned the Jews as a separate body, while on a social level ordinary people subjected Jews to discrimination, a trend which continued to increase as more opportunities become available to Jews and they became ever more equal with Gentiles. As Jews gained political rights, economic opportunities, and positions of cultural influence, their social inequality was thrown into relief against the background of perfect equality promised by the republican nation-state. Paradoxically, greater political equality made social inequality all the more obvious and intolerable. The disparity between the equality before the law and the actual inequality of situation was, in addition, perplexing to those that had absorbed the Enlightenment philosophy and revolution-era messaging that had extolled the virtue of equality as a veritable panacea for social ills. People assumed that as Jews became more equal their differences would evaporate; and they were surprised and dismayed when this did not happen. The confusion arose from a misguided belief that equality, as a political concept, could be applied in a social context – that a political concept such as “one man, one vote” could be a model for every aspect of society. Instead, Jews learned that while they could now vote, hold political office, access the justice system, attend university, etc., this equality before the law would never guarantee equal treatment by their fellow citizens.
Jews remained socially unequal, and this inequality would increasingly be connected to their Jewishness. With all legal barriers to assimilation demolished their visibility as Jews alone accounted for their social differences; legally, Jews were equal, and yet they were not the same. It stood to reason, so it was said, that Jewishness was a kind of immutable otherness. Figures who disrupted this narrative understandably drew great attention.
Benjamin Disraeli, a two-term conservative prime minister in Britain and a celebrated man of letters, was uniquely successful among assimilated Jews and was frequently cited as a high-profile counterexample to the pattern of social discrimination against the Jewish people in European nations. As select Jews, such as Disraeli, gained prominence there developed both an attraction to, and a resentment of, the “special Jew.” Gentiles abhorred the success of these “special Jews” but approved of the fact that their success was so exceptional as this entailed that, in general, Jews were far from achieving a level of social parity that would make Jewish accomplishment an ordinary fact of life. Jews likewise admired the achievements of other Jews who overcame discrimination but nonetheless recognized them as competition for power, money, accomplishment, and respect, which were doled out sparingly to the marginalized population. Neither of these reactions empowered Jews or protected them against their enemies as both attitudes reinforced the very belief that made Jews vulnerable to profiling, suspicion, hate, and ultimately violence: that Jews were perpetually “the other.”
It is worth noting that Disraeli, who seemed to triumph over racially-determined odds, was untutored in Jewish culture and religion. (His remoteness from his roots may in part explain why he was able to overcome discrimination and rise to such heights of achievement.) This didn’t prevent him from idealizing the genius of “his people” to the point where one might describe him as a “semitist” (recalling the referent missing from the term antisemitism). The various forms of special discrimination and special favor focused on Jewish public figures led to the erection of a “Jewish type” in the public mind; eventually this hyper-focus on decontextualized Jewish figures resulted in the reification of Jewish identity, as evidenced by the introduction of “Jewishness” as a quasi-legal term in the Third Reich.
As Jewish economic influence within the political sphere waned, Jewish visibility in society, particularly in the media and the liberal professions, increased thus allowing Jews to fashion a new identity that was more cultivated, modern, and on-the-scene. Prominent Jews who occupied positions mediating contact between celebrities and the public came to represent society by virtue of maintaining an interconnected international social web. With their visibility and perceived importance, these individuals became the enemy of those left behind: the symbol of globalization, which spread and exacerbated inequality and fueled the anger and false beliefs that led to the formation of the first antisemitic parties (founded in the 1870s) from which the Nazis would develop.
However, the mediating role of prominent Jews did not entail that Jews possessed especial power or privilege in any of the nations they helped forge ties between, nor that they belonged to a class of internationally authoritative global citizens. Arendt dismissed the “spurious world citizenship” of this (post-WWI) generation as only one can who has seen the power of a passport crumble in her own hands. The human rights that a liberal consensus would have granted to the refugee that Arendt herself became in 1933 didn’t appear in her hour of need. She thus was acutely aware of both the limited power of Jews within the international community and of the hollowness of the connections that purportedly afforded Jews globally influential status.
I) Between Pariah and Parvenu
During the period succeeding their ghettoization, Jews occupied a paradoxical position which derived from the shaky equilibrium of state and society that characterized the modern nation-state: Individual assimilation could grant social acceptance with no attendant political enfranchisement for the masses, while emancipation, that is, legal equality, could extend political rights without transforming widespread attitudes that resulted in social stigmatization and the proliferation of stereotypes and negative assumptions about Jews. Indeed, Jewish political emancipation, which ushered in the right to bring suit, vote, serve in office, etc., did not bring about social assimilation. Society admitted only the “exception Jew” who represented a simultaneous exception to, and confirmation of, “Jewishness.” In order to assimilate, the exceptional Jew was required to stand out from “the Jew in general”; to earn his place in respectable circles through outstanding ability, accomplishments, and charm. Yet, these gifts alone could not gain him acceptance; also necessary was the affirmation of his Jewishness, the affirmation of belonging to the very community from which he sought to distance himself.
Assimilation is both the individual’s adjustment to, and reception by, society. Those in favor of Jewish emancipation assumed that adjustment alone would prepare or correspond to assimilation and that the problem of assimilation was ultimately social in nature. The social mixing that had developed prior to emancipation had occurred between cultivated, educated Gentiles and like-minded Jews. As early as the eighteenth century some Jews had been included in an Enlightenment-guided embrace of a wider “exotic” humanity and were held up as exemplars of universal values who were also intriguing precisely on account of their differences. (As Mark Twain jibed: “They're just like everybody else, only more so!”) Proponents of Enlightenment thought were prepared to make of Jews “poster-children” of humanism–at least once they had discarded their own “narrow prejudices” or religious practices that had initially provided a motivation or rationale for social segregation. In other words, Jews had to “forget where they came from” in order to assimilate, all the while knowing that others would continue to mark their difference just the same.
For a while the separation of political and social reform worked in favor of the few educated Jews content to enjoy personal success. But the Revolution and the Napoleonic reforms that followed threatened the status of these privileged Jews by lumping them together with the ordinary. The reforms in particular announced a loss of opportunity and respect for the few privileged Jews rather than an extension of opportunities and respect to Jews en masse. In fact, upon emancipation more assimilated Jews chose to convert to Christianity; it was as though ordinary citizenship were more perilous than their previous status as exceptional, assimilated Jews had been.
After the revolution, personality became the sine qua non for one aspiring to rise in society, applying both to Jews hoping to socially assimilate and middle class Gentiles hoping to increase their wealth and political influence. As questions regarding personality became increasingly salient–both socially and politically–questions regarding identity generally became more urgent as well. Raised in a household more German than Jewish in which Beethoven and Mozart had eclipsed any remnant of Jewish folklore, Arendt herself was a case study in Jewish identity and specifically in the awakening of a sense of Jewish identity within someone who had been almost exclusively attuned to the treasures of German culture. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Arendt committed to a Zionist resistance to fascist politics, resolving to react as a Jew when persecuted as a Jew. In the midst of these concerns, the golden age of post-Enlightenment social freedom offered up the figure Arendt would recall and explore in her first book: Rahel Varnhagen.
The price of admittance to Rahel’s salon was itself a matter of personality and identity. One’s talent, character, and expressiveness were the factors that determined whether one was eligible for inclusion. When the Jews of Prussia, particularly those located in the cosmopolitan center of Berlin, were perceived as “exception Jews,” their talent and virtue shone brightly against a backdrop of the less cultured masses of their Eastern brethren. To be an exception, to be a Jew who was not “like Jews,” was a path to social acceptance that allowed Jews like Rahel to carve out a place for themselves in society. Through exceptionalism a Jew could become “ordinary,” a participating member of society rather than an “othered” object of derision and stigma.
With the changing geopolitics of the Napoleonic Era , nations began extending political rights to all Jews regardless of their social status through formal emancipation. As a result wealthy, educated Jews could no longer assert that they were categorically different from other Jews, and even greater efforts were needed to distinguish themselves. Now, formerly privileged Jews were no longer seen as exceptional individuals but as members of a class profiting from government largesse. The Berlin society that once accepted the talented Jew would now tolerate only the Jew who wasn’t really a Jew, that is, whose assimilation had left him sufficiently distanced from his roots. Among the assimilated, intellectuals held pride of place; Moses Mendelssohn was the prime example and deserves his own chapter in any study of the era.
While the court Jew commanded the allegiance of his people however socially-removed they were from the regal pomp in which he operated, he still lived among them. The Jewish banker of the nineteenth century likewise held sway over poorer Jews who idolized and wished to emulate him; yet he lived neither among them nor among the Gentiles but as a caste apart, proud in his power and unaware of its true limitations. One Jewish broker of the early eighteenth century answered the accusation of pride and demonstrated its power to both consume and blind thusly: “We are not princes, but we govern them…”
The assimilation of privileged Jews led to the fragmentation and dissolution of Jewish communities. Thus, these communities lost their autonomy long before any state interference, including the imposition of civil marriages and inheritance laws superseding Jewish law and custom. Intermarriage between the international banking families (including members that belonged either to Jewish or Gentile society) created a caste apart. Observers marked this practice and the consequent consolidation of wealth as a remnant of feudalism and concluded that Jews were a backwards and exclusionary people who would always exist apart from European society.
Two exceptions to this social divide who managed in some sense to bridge the gap were: i) the wealthy “notable” who gained influence in broader society and retained dominance among his people; and ii) the Jewish intellectual intent on distancing himself from his roots and thereby gaining recognition from the rest of the world. Individuals in both categories considered themselves “exception Jews”–the former due to his usefulness to the state and the latter due to an elite cultivation of skills and connections that opened society’s doors. Many of these individuals also considered themselves not only exceptions to the norms governing the structure of social relations but categorically different from Jews as a group. Some Jews, such as Karl Marx, who witnessed these exceptions achieve success outside of Jewish society were extremely critical of them. They had seen the favor granted to wealthy Jews and bitterly resented their own poverty. Resentment towards exception Jews, then, was an expression of opposition toward both state and society which had allowed a select group of Jews to succeed at the expense of all others.
The Jews who converted to Christianity in the era following the reforms of the early nineteenth century did so to avoid being lumped in with the newly liberated masses. Conversion, as an assimilationist strategy that would nevertheless reinforce the primacy of the family, trumped both mixed marriages and religious fidelity and allowed the family line to remain intact. By contrast, in the case that a Jew married a Gentile, the kinship lineage would be disrupted and in all likelihood consummate a turning away from religious observance. Conversions also stemmed from the fierce antagonism of Marx and other Jewish intellectuals to the assimilationist strategies of rich Jewish bankers who supported the reactionary governments of the era.
In her discussion of the evolving relations between Jews and Gentiles in European nation- states, Arendt concentrated on Germany, which straddled the extremes of relations with Jews, empowering court Jews with substantial privilege while subjecting the masses to discrimination and ultimately the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century. In this way Germany demonstrated a dialectical relationship between the positive pole of emancipation and assimilation and the negative pole of persecution.
The push-pull interplay that existed between the extremes of privilege and discrimination not only created divisons in society but divided selves. The elitist cultivation of the exception Jew never quite disappeared, and certain Jews continued to enjoy wealth and status in post-feudal Europe; yet, their position as “exceptions” and successes never quite dissolved their status as Jewish and “other.” The ambiguity of identity was especially pronounced in those who aimed to be “a man in the street” and a Jew only “at home”, since, contrary to their desires and expectations, they continued to feel excluded and different from others in the street while also feeling disconnected and distinct from other Jews at home. Entrance to the salons, for example, required a conformism on the part of the Jewish postulant that made him palatable in Gentile circles, but that nonetheless was leavened with just enough of the exotic for him to be intriguing and thus preferred over a Gentile of equal talents or education.
The taste for distinction created a “type” among the assimilated, transforming Judaism into a primarily psychological quality weighing on every Jew. This new type, the cultured, tasteful Jew, a type perhaps as singular as the court Jew had been, was as far removed from the hateful stereotype of the pushy, conniving “Jew in general” as it was from the idealized humanitarian of the apologists. The lengths to which “Aryan” alarmists would go in delineating the Jewish threat–maintaining that the more assimilated Jews posed the greatest danger, since their clandestine “inner Jew” was awaiting its deadly chance to strike–is reason enough to attend to the distinctions Arendt observes among members of the Jewish community.
Two such distinctions–the parvenu and the pariah–help to explain why Jews as a group were neither a united community nor capable of fully assimilating in Gentile society. The Jew of the apologists, the idealized humanitarian, was rare enough in any society, but equally rare was its opposite: the parvenu, an aggressive schemer or arriviste who sought assimilation at all costs. The parvenu was content for Jews to remain marginalized as a group so long as he personally stood to shine by comparison and rise at their expense. He achieved this through a combination of egocentric investment in his individual success and practiced conformity to Gentile norms. The pariah, by contrast, shunned Gentile society altogether and thus castigated and cut ties with Jews who sought the boons of assimilation.
Social discrimination led to the creation of both types. The parvenu attempted to fight against his “othering” by pushing and pleading for inclusion, while the pariah responded to it instead by avoiding all contact and connection with the people and institutions responsible for perpetuating anti-Jewish bias, hoping, if not planning, to dismantle the system. The qualities that came to define these types, servility and obstreperousness, respectively, were not inbred but rather predictable responses to oppression and shame. Thus, where the pariah sought to destroy and reform society’s ills the parvenu looked to profit from them. Every nineteenth-century Jew faced the regretful decision of whether to conform or rebel, and both paths were solitary: The assimilated Jew never truly experienced kinship in Gentile circles, while the Jew who rejected society thus eliminated the possibility of rights, luxuries, and successes that endowed one with a sense of satisfaction and dignity and that only social inclusion could bestow.
A Jew in society was perpetually on stage, a character half ashamed and half proud of his heritage, a virtuoso envied and admired–and constantly observed–by the fashionable bourgeoisie. Whatever their connection to Christianity Jews were an audience for whom the “sin” of denying the Messiah had been reduced to a mere vice, and association with Jews merely added an element of excitement and spice to an evening’s round of pleasures. As Arendt notes, a sin or crime can be atoned for, but a vice must be extirpated. So, when Gentiles began to welcome Jews into their milieu, it wasn’t so much that Jews had been absolved of their supposed agency in Jesus’ death, but rather that such moral qualms had lost any power to persuade. It was, indeed, an expression of the Enlightenment curiosity about everything human, which gave way to Romanticism’s morbid lust for an array of “exotic” and “abnormal” manifestations of humanity of which Jews were the sole case connected to a political question.
II) The Potent Wizard
Born in London to an “entirely assimilated” family, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) entered politics in 1871 and rose to the office of prime minister in 1874. Disraeli was baptized a Christian in accordance with his father’s judgment that it would increase his chances in society and was notably deficient in any knowledge of Jewish religion or culture. An ambitious careerist from an “exotic” background, Disraeli nonetheless underscored his ostensible difference as a Jew, capitalizing on his “uniqueness” to increase his visibility, remarkability, and popularity in society.
For Disraeli, being a Jew in high society could be as much an opportunity as a handicap, and he aphorized this ambiguous status thusly: “What is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few.” The “few” in this case refers to the gentry whose attitude (a scorn for the natural equality of men) he claimed to share. This belief in universal equality embodied by the French Revolution and its champion, Napoleon, the scourge of landed elites across Europe, Disraeli took delight in deflating; he took equal delight in exploiting his Jewish origins by pointing out that it was the Rothschilds who had helped defeat the upstart Corsican adventurer. As for his “crimes,” Disraeli could very well have been referring to his scandalous debts and adulteries. Arendt, however, saw in this attitude a signal of something deeper–a sure precursor of respectable society’s descent into mob mentality and the mindset of a collective of social failures who were ready to jettison moral principle merely for the purpose of relieving boredom or despair. In Arendt’s view Disraeli purposefully inserted himself into the most rarified strata of society so as to demonstrate that “crime” (the killing of Christ) could be changed into an attractive “vice.” (One might buttress the argument by pointing out that in the Victorian Age the intemperate pursuit of pleasure that turned common women into prostitutes wasn’t a crime; being poor was.)
The England that played host to Disraeli’s ambition had barely known an impoverished class of Jews. The Portuguese Jews from whom Disraeli sprang came to the Isles with comparative wealth, and it was only the scourge of Russian pogroms that flung poor Jews westward. Unaware that his lot was exceptional (as would have also been the case on the continent), he rejected the corrective universalism of the Rights of Man as promoted by the French Revolution and instead sided with Edmund Burke in championing the rights of Englishmen – in blithe ignorance of the desire widespread among Jews for emancipation. His uncut, innocent careerism came unsullied by any experience of a Jewish underclass putting his exceptionalism into stark relief. With no need to downplay his “Jewishness” so as to distinguish himself from a crowd of uncouth Jews, he could quite openly profit from the exotic allure an Eastern background might afford him.
The success that Disraeli attributed explicitly to Jewish influence and organization seemed made to order for the vicious propaganda to come. He claimed to be “the chosen man of a chosen race,” and his history seemed to confirm the idea that Jews had gained an unusual amount of political power and social influence. Disraeli rose from distrusted pariah to intimate of the queen. His power as prime minister, though reduced on a political level by Parliament, remained socially paramount. In Disraeli’s era it was harder to gain acceptance in the highest circles of gentlemen than it was to gain political office; hence, Disraeli’s social ascent represented his greatest achievement. He became genuinely popular by playing on only the advantages of his origins. His ambition to hobnob with the toffs was a popular one that Disraeli traced to his inherited conceit, and that he sought to realize by emphasizing his difference from Gentiles, summoning up a “pride of race to confront a pride of caste.” In other words, his uniqueness and self-proclaimed superiority as a Jew prepared him all too well to become a putative member of the landed gentry.
Arendt takes great pains to unpack the welter of ambition and entitlement that fueled Disraeli’s rise. A Jew, in his view, achieved noble status by virtue of birth; by nature, Jews were destined for achievement. Modern racial theories allowed anyone the presumption of superiority; beliefs about “Aryan” racial purity became well known given their catastrophic effects in Western Europe, but many of these ideas were in fact modeled on the kinds of beliefs about the “chosen” people–the Jews–that Disraeli and others advanced. Some of the beliefs Disraeli subscribed to are as follows: that race surmounted both language and religion as the key to both history and personal identity; that only blood determined race; and that the only aristocracy was that of an unmixed race. He taunted a nobility diluted with the sale of titles and increasingly unsure of its identity with both the fact of his pure bloodline and with Christ’s Jewish heritage. At the same time, his bias toward the nobility was modeled on aristocratic concepts of caste that harmonized with his aversion to top-down political “equalization.”
Disraeli’s rise occurred in tandem with the fading hope among Jews of the Messiah’s coming to redeem all of mankind. Without this hope the idea of chosenness devolved into a state of eternal segregation and the redemption of mankind into a philanthropic universalism, a merely secular advocacy of progress and justice. As Arendt, a doctor of Theology, would explain, the bonds of hope tying Israel to the rest of humanity were sundered by those Jews too “enlightened” to believe in God.
Disraeli’s peculiar assimilation puts into high relief several elements: the liquidation of (Jewish) national consciousness (he was British to the core, not a son of Israel) leading to a chauvinism based on an idolatry of the individual; the reduction of a national religion (the Jewish nation within the nation) to a merely confessional denomination (a system of beliefs and practices sundered from humanity’s redemption); and the ambiguous adjustments of Jews vis-à-vis state and society. The migration of chosenness from Judaism to Jewishness found its truest expression in Disraeli. England was his Israel, his Chosen Land, and his fanciful support for imperial ventures abroad was far removed from the concrete reality of the massacres to come.
His novels featured secret societies and politically crucial financiers whose conspiracies outran all other superstitions of eras past, complete with ritual murders and well poisonings. In his phantasmagoria, all secret societies, be they of Freemasons, Communists, or Catholics, were but the tools of Jews bent on avenging the ungratefulness of Christendom. (Disraeli conceived of the ingratitude of Christians toward Jews according to the basic schema: We, the Jews, raised Christ to be your Savior; therefore, you are indebted to us. In this way, Disraeli could align Jews with Salvation, profiting, once again, from his origins.) Additionally, secret societies were the prime mover in the world. Lacking a complete understanding of actual political agents and their motivations, Disraeli came to believe , or at least pretend , that secret societies, metaphysical “essences,” and age-old archetypes actively shaped international affairs, ignoring the actual historical determinants of world events.
Given his taste for secrecy and hierarchy, admittance to the mysteriously exclusive English social clubs was one of Disraeli’s strongest aspirations. His separation from Jewish society and desire to fascinate and earn the approval of a bored bourgeois audience led Disraeli to concoct dangerous fairytales that invested Jews with traits and powers bordering on the occult. Courting the aristocracy led him to elevate race as a bulwark against equality. While his goal was to improve his own image by highlighting Jewish agency and competency, the strategy backfired. Following the imperialist scramble for Africa, this racialized worldview led to a catastrophe for his own people.
The scramble occurred after Disraeli’s retirement from political office. During his tenure as prime minister, his worldview had had no concrete application and had appeared harmless and irrelevant to most observers. But the florid exposition Disraeli gave to racial theories in his novels, culminating in the person of the “exception Jew,” made them a time bomb detonating first on the African continent and then in Europe. Just as the system of English common law might be considered a surer precursor of the American Constitution than was the French Revolution, so one might judge the earlier industrialization of England, with its attendant need for financial acumen, to be a context more fertile for Jewish aspirations than any occult dispensation favoring his own people. The point here is that if Disraeli appeared bizarrely ahead of his time and anomalous in his fancies and ambitions, he nevertheless exploited the conditions that had made the fortune of his grandfather, the literary reputation of his father, and the peerage that he so coveted.
III) Between Vice and Crime
Arendt positions the era between 1789 and 1918 as that beholden to the French Revolution and to the recognition of the Rights of Man. But by the end of World War I, the Jacobins’ idealism and radical political organizing had faltered, setting the scene for increased competition among European nations for the imperialist domination of Africa and Asia. WWI set worker against worker along national lines and neutralized the international unionization and radicalization of industrial labor through unhinged violence and propaganda that demonized enemy nations. Imperialists had succeeded in their exploitation of global resources (often through genocidal campaigns masquerading as humanitarian interventions for distant European onlookers), but after WWI the imperial project taken up by Germany would look to Europe itself as a space to “cleanse” and then re-people with its own citizens.
Arendt also looks to turn-of-the-century France as a preview of what was to darken the Weimar and Austrian republics decades later, and to the fiction of Marcel Proust, the assimilated son of a Jewish physician and a frequent figure in the fashionable salons of Paris, for the fullest portrait of a society in which “the victory of bourgeois values over the the citizen’s sense of responsibility meant the decomposition of political issues into their dazzling reflections in society.” Unpacking this observation demands a lot of the reader. The notion of “bourgeois values” incorporates the primacy of the individual over familial or other cooperative structures–basically, ‘I've got mine’; the privilege of capital over labor, in which the interest of shareholders trumps any other considerations; and the elevation of the private interest over the public–for example, sending one’s children to expensive private schools while cutting the budget for public education. The “citizen’s sense of responsibility” means protecting and nurturing the public good. In the example of education, which represents an investment in the competence and cultivation of one’s fellow citizens, responsibility would prescribe continued investment in public education whether or not a person directly benefited from it. The description of “the decomposition of political issues into their dazzling reflections in society” refers to the identification of public interests with celebrities–famous or infamous. It is politics as spectacle, as entertainment, as the play of personality.
Proust’s portrayal of a Jew in non-Jewish society is the testimony of a triple outsider: writer, Jew, and homosexual. This agent of de-judaized Judaism clearly saw the conflation of the latter two identities which were transformed during this period from crimes into vices, that is, from qualities that reflected agency and humanity into traits that were essential, immutable, and outside the scope of human intervention. The old school moralizing that incriminates the “abnormal” (anything from theft to pederasty) attributed human will and agency to the criminal, allowing society to demand punishment and expect atonement. This is because the criminal, who was still considered to be human, rational, and capable of choice, was also considered to be responsible for what they had done (which is why we don’t legitimately execute the legally insane, or people who are incapable of reason and responsibility, even for murder). By contrast, reimagining “crimes” as “vices” meant depriving the criminal of responsibility and therefore of the defining condition of humanity. While “racial pre-destination” excused individual crimes committed by those deemed racially inferior, it also turned race, the alleged source of criminality and inferiority, into vice, or inborn evil. Hence, Jews and members of other “inferior” groups were now considered to be natural-born aberrations, less than human, outside the scope of human laws and society, and thus worthy of social discrimination.
This new morality led to countless questions regarding which groups were excluded from membership in the community of responsible agents. Were Jews naturally inclined to treason due to their “rootless wandering”? Were “sexual inverts” (homosexuals) so deviant as to predispose them to murder?
Parsing this issue, Arendt noted: “In assimilating crime and transforming it into a vice, society denies all responsibility and establishes a world of fatalities in which men find themselves entangled.” In Arendt’s view, achieving a more just and responsible world required society to own up to its failures: to educate, rehabilitate, and treat the illnesses that befell its members. Failure to do so ended in crime, and to pretend this crime was evidence of individual vice rather than a reflection of the conditions of society was a retreat from responsibility. The “world of fatalities” is that of the criminally predisposed, of those “born that way” and operating in a jungle of plunder in which the strong destroy the weak just as the lion slays the lamb. It is the consequence of a supposedly liberal application of compassion that enshrines a perverted tolerance, denying people the elementary dignity of being recognized as the author of their actions. As Arendt states: “The seeming broadmindedness that equates crime and vice, if allowed to establish its own code of law, will invariably prove to be more cruel and inhuman than laws, no matter how severe, which respect and recognize man’s independent responsibility for his behavior.”
The enlightened liberal society of Proust’s time did not doubt that homosexuals were “criminals” and Jews “traitors,” but the perverse tolerance it mandated merely revised its attitude toward crime and treason. Proust’s fictional character brandishing his updated droit de seigneur (aristocratic sexual license), the homosexual Baron de Charlus, rose in society not in spite of his “vice” but on account of the fluttery fascination it provoked as he paraded his lovers and singular opinions amid the refined company of high society. Jews also became welcome and popular as an antidote to the ennui peculiar to fin-de-siècle amusement. But high society proved to be an equivocal haven: Vice was a welcome distraction but only if it was not too “perverse” and not too visible.
Arendt’s dissection of French Jewry in the period marked by the Panama Scandal represents another example of antisemitism beguiling the public not through any inherent plausibility of the ideology itself but rather in how it attached itself to major events. Arendt contends that political antisemitism couldn’t have brought on catastrophe without a concomitant social element appealing to the public. (Here again we see the dialectic of political rights and social biases in action.) Because social conflicts remained unresolved it fell to the poets and novelists to seize upon the social factors that colluded in the blind march toward extermination.
Proust charted the patronizing treatment society inflicted on the educated, assimilated Jew, the crucible in which the outer markings of faith–the institutions, practices, and obligations–were left behind, and Judaism was transformed into mere Jewishness. With the religious dimensions obscured Jews themselves were transformed from adherents of a “heretical faith” into carriers of a hidden, interior vice. Judaism, as a fulfillment of Jewish Law, consisted of what one did, such as going to Temple, but Jewishness was wholly determined by what one was and was fixed by birth. (The application of this essentialist principle by the Nazis didn’t fail to surprise many of the assimilated.)
Proust’s coupling of the Jewish cliques and the “inverts” only codified the place fashionable people had made for them; an eerie prescience was borne out in the subsequent Nazi condemnation of the two as a pair yoked in degeneration. In addition to these similarities, Proust noted that both experienced a sense of pride connected to their social differences. The fixation on categories of identity and birth alternated between apologetics and elitism, echoing the historically ambivalent status of Jews as over- or under-privileged prior to emancipation. As the middle classes gained ground, the aristocracy couldn’t help but judge its “common” values and dictates. Through a blasé mixing of caste and outcast and an acute awareness of the actual hierarchies in play, it set the tone for society as a whole.
Here we can see Jews being enrolled as emblems of the contempt high society felt for common morality. Their admission into the salons of exclusive cliques lost its luster as a marker of social equality since they were merely being used by members of competing Gentile social groups of the middle classes and the aristocracy to fulfill selfish needs (e.g. as a source of entertainment or as objects of disdain that allowed Gentiles to feel and appear superior). The “Jewish Question,” once again, figured as a symbolic element in a class struggle that would see the bourgeoisie triumphant in the takeover of the state.
The issue that tetanized society, the Dreyfus Affair, had made the Jews a cause célèbre, but as soon as the accused was declared innocent, the fickle affections of the aristocracy evaporated, and Gentiles who had previously included Jews in their social sphere dropped them without a second thought. As the coreligionists of the accused captain they were judged to be traitors by blood and valuable as specimens of vice only as long as he was assumed to be guilty. In Germany and Austria after WWI, the mob began calling for the death of the Jewish “merchants of war,” who were maligned in the popular imaginary as cynical profiteers, much to the delight of high society whose members again found in the Jews a wellspring of fascinating vice. Arendt postulates that these snotty “philo-semites,” once confronted with antisemitic legislation, hastily washed their hand of the Jews. This may account for the high numbers of the highly educated who went on to run the death camps. EXPAND
Arendt summarizes the situation as follows: “Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from ‘Jewishness’ there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated.” The coming trial of a Jewish army officer uncovered a myriad of social clefts at work and made clear how the apparent democratization of the fashionable world hid an intensified hierarchy and an even greater danger for French Jewry. As society became willing to embrace “crime” in the form of vice, they set a precedent for the mob, who were willing to “cleanse” their community of vice and were emboldened to consider Jews and other groups criminals by birth since the aristocracy itself had openly acknowledged (and embraced) their criminality. Arendt’s vision here is truly novelistic in its depth and attention to the telling detail. She is no sociologist armed with tables of statistics, but her core theme–that of the conflict between state and society–enchants the reader in ways that compel further investigation.
Chapter Four: The Dreyfus Affair
I) The Facts of the Case
In 1894, a high-ranking officer in the French army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was accused and convicted of the crime of passing military secrets to the Germans by virtue of the security clearance he enjoyed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on a bug-infested isle in the Caribbean. By 1896, Colonel Georges Picquart, who was heading the Information division, had uncovered the truth regarding these charges of espionage: Another officer, Esterhazy, was in fact the culprit. For his pains Picquart was taken off the case and reassigned to a post in Tunisia. Soon after, journalist Bernard Lazare published an article contradicting and critiquing the government's case. In November 1897, the prominent statesman Clemenceau began agitating to re-open the case, and to public outrage the novelist Émile Zola published “J'accuse…!” as an open letter in support of Dreyfus.
In August 1898, Esterhazy was dishonorably discharged for embezzlement. He then rushed to a British journalist with the confession that it was he, on orders from a superior, who had forged the documents framing Dreyfus. Soon after another conspirator in the frame-up, officer Hubert-Joseph Henry, admitted to having forged other documents and committed suicide. In 1899 the Court of Appeal annulled the original decision, reduced the prison term, and offered to pardon Dreyfus, which the captain accepted to avoid facing extinction back on Devil’s Island. In May 1900, with the eyes of the world on France due its hosting of the World Exposition, the French Senate voted against any revision of the case. In 1906, with the ascension of Clemenceau to the office of Prime Minister, Dreyfus was at last acquitted,even though the court as constituted had no power to acquit without holding a new trial–one which, bizarrely, could have easily resulted in the reconviction of a patently innocent man. In spite of this, Dreyfus continued to face public censure and suspicion. In 1908, on the transfer of Zola’s ashes to the solemn crypt of the Pantheon in Paris, Dreyfus was set on as he marched in the funeral cortege.
Despite the corruption, delays, and irregularities, this case, Arendt insists, became a beacon of the nineteenth century’s pride in the impartiality of the law. Among historians who took a side in the case and assigned individual blame accordingly, Arendt alone saw beyond the injustice and treachery of the case, choosing to place it in the social context of how a parvenu such as Dreyfus came to catalyze the biases of an entire nation and lay bare the hypocrisies of the elite. The outcome of the case brought with it consequences that varied wildly in their social impact: It neutralized the popular mob support for Esterhazy and activated the separation of church and state in a way that calmed the anti-clerical and anti-nobility furies, but hatred of the Jews and suspicion of the army’s General Staff, the Republic, and Parliament also increased.
The gestation of anti-republican forces in reaction to the egalitarian policies that admitted a Jew into the officer corps in the first place eventually delivered the Third Republic into the hands of the old anti-dreyfusard clique formed in the army years before. (Petain, later the face of Vichy France’s collaboration with Germany in WWII, had been on the General Staff when only a committed anti-dreyfusard would have been tolerated.) The Affair, with its cry of “Death to the Jews,” presaged the character of the coming catastrophe some 30 years prior to Nazi rule. Years before the appearance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an entire nation had been racking its brains trying to determine whether “secret Rome” or “secret Judah” held the reins of world politics. The hero of the “Affair” is not Dreyfus, whose family would have gladly paid to get him out of prison, but Clemenceau; and the origin of the affair lies in the Panama Canal Scandal.
The Affair divided France so venomously that the truth became its first casualty: not the truth of Dreyfus’ innocence, but the larger truth of why it had happened at all and how it set the groundwork for what was to follow a generation later. Arendt is among the very few willing to admit the antisemitism of the victim’s familial milieu, the complacent attitudes of a wealthy Jewish family apparently unconcerned with the racial politics they assumed they needn’t fear. Since they identified as French first and foremost, they were sure the public and the military court would concur and did not foresee the role discrimination would play in the case (see Marrus 1971).
Arendt seems especially sensitive to this issue, and for good reason: In 1933, at the time of her arrest by the Gestapo in Berlin, Arendt came to the realization that claiming one’s rights as a German citizen wouldn’t protect her from unlawful harassment or worse; if she was attacked as a Jew then she must respond as a Jew. This was exactly the approach rejected by the Dreyfus clan, who thought it better to keep their (Jewish) heads down and not call attention to the antisemitism at the heart of the Affair. It is precisely the passive collusion of Jewish elites with state power that went unmentioned, even in the popular liberal accounts of the Affair, and that remains a hot button issue; even today, Arendt’s treatment of the Jewish councils that facilitated the identification, plunder, and deportation of European Jews in the Holocaust remains a controversial subject that is far from being resolved. Her own history of assimilation and radicalization doesn’t make her analysis of antisemitism infallible, but one cannot discount her own experience as a refugee fleeing persecution, her enlistment in the Zionist resettlement of children in Palestine, her internment in France, and her escape and eventual resettlement in America. Hers was not merely an intellectual conception of antisemitic persecution: She knew how it felt, how it sounded, and how it smelled.
II) The Third Republic and French Jewry
The years 1880–1888 saw little progress in the construction of the Panama Canal under the direction of de Lesseps, the man who conceived plans to construct the Suez Canal, in spite of the 1.3 billion French francs amassed in loans to the state. Investors were nonetheless confident that the government-backed bonds would prove a safe and profitable investment. The Rothschilds, who had always accommodated themselves to the powers-that-be, had retired from government service; their preference for the rigid order and class hierarchies of monarchies had long fueled their disdain for a republic that appeared to have no need of them, and the Canal was thus funded by government bonds hawked to the public. The eventual bankruptcy of the company brought about the financial ruin of half a million French people, and the involvement of Parliament in the scheme was uncovered to be a colossal racket. Two Jewish players in the fiasco, Reinach and Herz, operated as go-betweens enabling payments among legislators and the company; they also garnered commissions that, in one case dwarfed the actual loan they had facilitated. Reinach’s confession of malfeasance to the Libre Parole, in which he fingered crooked politicians, vaulted the once obscure antisemitic paper and its editor, Edouard Drumont, onto the national stage (see Kauffmann 2008).
The scandal revealed the extent to which members of Parliament had morphed into businessmen ready to betray the public trust, while also demonstrating that the intermediaries between the company and the state were Jewish newcomers rather than the big players of times past. The cession of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany following the debacle of the 1870 war with Prussia sent a new wave of Jews into France’s urban centers, notably Paris, and the confluence of Jewish achievement in these cultural centers and national disgrace put Jews center stage in a scam perpetrated by two bodies: the Panama company and Parliament, which notably comprised no Jewish members. After 1881, swindle became the only law as Reinach’s chicanery allowed political opportunists to invoke the “parasitism” of Jews on an otherwise healthy body-politic. Under the protection of the monarchy Jews had occupied financial roles unattractive to the bourgeoisie, but under parliamentary rule financial expansion became possible to a degree previously unheard of, drawing the interest of Gentile businessmen. The bourgeoisie now reigning in parliament were unable to seduce the old-line financiers, such as the Rothschilds, whom they found suspect and “foreign” to their class. This created the opening for figures such as Jacques Reinach to operate in consolidating the capital of the Jewish community in service to whatever government held sway.
The new players, who lacked the traditional qualifications and business sensibility of their predecessors, arrived in the aftermath of a disastrous war capped by the slaughter of 20,000 Communards in Paris. They saw that the outcome of the merciless repression of the Communards wasn’t a functioning republic but a body–disordered and nearly primed for dictatorial rule that was ready to fall back on the defense of vested interests through thoroughgoing corruption.
If in the era of the court Jews the Jewish financier both enabled state investment and remained committed to the interest of his people, on their road to emancipation Jews seemingly achieved neither. Indeed, Jews who did participate often undermined the reputation of the Jewish people generally when they were implicated (however indirectly) in corrupt financial endeavors that ended in failure, such the Panama scam. Any Jews involved were, of course, highlighted as scapegoats. Publicly villainizing Jews allowed the bourgeoisie to preserve their own reputation and position themselves as morally blameless figures in competition with conspiring imperial globalists. The snug relations between a unified Jewry and an absolute monarch, one by definition independent of social pressure, had given way to an expedient relation between an upstart financial class and a wobbly state machine.
Arendt contends that both old and new money colluded in helping society “batten on the state,” contributing to the ongoing conflict between a society still in thrall to its antisemitic biases and a state progressively making good on its promise of equal enfranchisement for all citizens. Given this split the question naturally arises: By what means did society attach itself to the state for the purpose of exploiting it?
III) The Army and Clergy Against the Republic
The army figured so negatively in the Dreyfus Affair due to its alienation from the democratic mission inherited from the revolution. Although the national institution par excellence, its stalwarts remained heirs to the monarchist reaction of aristocrats who fought against their own country to reestablish the king after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. A vestige of the Second Empire, the army allied itself with the Catholic Church whose historic meritocracy appealed to officer-class postulants born to the lower class.
The army was held to be above the corruption endemic to the era. Thus, the state saw no reason to democratize it and so place it under civilian control. This created an unpredictable and insular entity–a caste apart. The Church’s blind support of the army in disgracefully persecuting Dreyfus cost it whatever political influence such an alliance was meant to ensure; the disgrace included the army’s Intelligence Service becoming known as a “fake factory” for trafficking in the sort of forged documents that had cost the innocent captain his reputation, career, and health. The Church hierarchy posited itself as an authoritarian bulwark against the chaos, allegedly bringing a semblance of civilian control to the army, but its actual influence was more questionable.
The vicious antisemitism calling for discrimination and massacres, as featured in the “Henry Memorial,” a subscription to aid the perjured officer’s widow, was clearly the work of the Jesuits, who needed no fascist urging in their forging of international policy within the Church. It was the Jesuits who oversaw the confessional practice of army officers; as such, the entrance of a Jew–Dreyfus–into their midst was intolerable. Complicating the matter was the cosmopolitan disdain the captain’s assimilated rich family had for everyday Jews, an element rarely remarked upon in the popular retelling of the Dreyfus saga. Ambitious Jews might take on antisemitic perspectives with impunity in the salons of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but penetrating the military caste was judged a step too far and aroused an unimaginably nasty response.
The Dreyfuses were an upper class Jewish family so assimilated they could complacently tolerate the antisemitism of their social milieu, reassured by the illusion that their relative privilege could insulate them from prejudice. They owed their ascension to liberal republican values and failed to understand how the values that had enfranchised them had also made them vulnerable by extending opportunities and privileges while also making them targets of resentment. Additionally, they also failed to judge the extent of the corruption undermining the stability of the very republic that espoused these values. It was nonetheless a republic so given to financial chicanery that a half-million French citizens were ruined in one fell swoop (by the Panama Scandal), and that boasted an army free of civilian oversight–save that of its Jesuit confessors. (Notably, the army and the church imagined themselves to be the only barriers to national chaos, and their grandiosity in many ways fueled the lack of accountability and tendency toward conservative repressiveness that flourished in the Third Republic.)
The Dreyfuses bumped up hard against the General Staff, a caste hostile to modern liberalism whose vitriol fastened on the family’s wealth and the captain’s promotion to the highest levels of the armed services. This respected body contravened all legitimate protocol by sharing details of a case still under adjudication with the Libre Parole, an act that Arendt attributes to their fear of Jewish influence post-Panama and to the public reaction to a contested loan to Russia arranged by the Rothschilds.Distrust of the Jews was so rampant that even the respected socialist leader Juan Juares failed to rally to Bernard Lazare’s plea for a revision of the case. Complicating the matter further was the Dreyfus family’s use of tactics usually reserved for equivocal cases in which the proof of innocence wasn’t so clear. These included backdoor appeals to politicians, a time-honored way of avoiding persecution for a people deprived of civil rights, but in this instance a curious anachronism perhaps attributable to an elitist disdain for publicity of any sort.
The real hero of the case was the one politician who stood up for republican values, Clemenceau, who presciently warned that by “infringing on the rights of one you infringe on the rights of all.” If a corrupt parliament and the higher strata of society were content to shame Jews back into subservience, it was primarily to cleanse their consciences and rehabilitate their reputations, allowing them to retain power and privilege despite their own scandals and misdeeds. This is why the surreptitious appeals were so ill-conceived and why Zola’s and Clemenceau’s open demands for justice made such sense. But those who led the mob in calls of “Death to the Jews” or “France for the French” had found a way to reconcile the masses to a crooked world of swindle and spoil.
IV) The People and the Mob
The mob is a caricature of “the people.” “People” is a generic term equivalent to “human beings”, but “the people” has different connotations and can designate: the citizens of a republic (as in “We, the people …”); the class of peasants serving the Church and aristocracy in medieval times; the class of workers organized in fraternal opposition to the bourgeoisie and the owners of the means of production. (CEOs may have associations, but they aren’t framed in the same way as “brotherhoods.”) According to Arendt, “The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented.” Residue is what remains after one has poured off what liquid solution one can use; in social terms it might refer to students with no hope of employment, the chronically unemployed, criminals, the ruined aristocracy, the failing politician. The mob attracts those who have been left out of, or ejected from, industrial society–to put it bluntly, the ‘losers’ by a society’s standards, but also those whose resentments find no echo in the mainstream politics of their day.
The mob forms as a reaction to scandals and frauds that have shaken the public’s confidence in its institutions and/or leadership. Overcome with doubt and disillusionment, its members seek the assurances that only a strongman can provide. The top-down model of authoritarian governance provides both speed and certainty while managing to masquerade as a bottom-up “people’s mandate” through selective use of political pageantry and, initially, tools such as the plebiscite or referendum that overcome the shady delays and “trickery” of legislators. Symbolic incidents of direct democracy coupled with the strongman’s ultranationalism reignite the mob’s enthusiasm for the political process as well as their sense of entitlement and desire for social inclusion. For the mob, excluded as it was from society, and in particular from its levers of power, enfranchisement of the Jews was hateful, and the successes of assimilated Jews were intolerable. Contempt for government naturally extended to the demographic who relied on its protection and, according to the mob, reaped unjust privileges: Jews. Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons all in turn were characterized as shadowy figures in conspiracies to rule the world and were just a handful of the groups said to threaten the people, their movement, and their rights.
The Henry Memorial, a subscription drive to benefit the family of the disgraced anti-Dreyfus conspirator who killed himself, outdid the common mob in its willful call to massacre and atrocity; it was all the more disturbing for the number of intellectuals and even Jews who contributed. That a Jewish historian could applaud the “great collective moment” spoke to how deeply committed the Jews were to a society ready to eliminate them and how blinded they were to the motivations and psychology of the mob.
Into this maelstrom stepped Picquart, a duty-bound and conventionally antisemitic officer who dared do what others, including Jews avoiding the affair, couldn’t: All prejudices aside, he broke the case open on the basis of republican values. Clemenceau’s articles were hardly partisan in their defense of Jacobin values, incorporating no brief for or against the army or the Church, but a mob orchestrated by the army and radicalized by the Libre Parole was nonetheless set against him and Emile Zola. Zola was charged with libel amidst a hysteria so potent that if he had been acquitted (he fled the country, fearing the worst) he might never have left the courtroom alive, a casualty of crowd madness.
The mob in question was a hodgepodge of students, monarchists, adventurers, and gangsters who shared a common sense of resentment rather than specific grievances or political principles. Since their bonds were based on raw emotion they readily inflamed one another, leading to increasingly extreme demonstrations. The mob coordinated riots across Paris and other centers. They could count on the inaction of the police, who were by and large conservative anti-Dreyfusards, and ran roughshod over any show of support for Dreyfus with impunity. The mob’s leadership also signalled its essential difference from other popular movements that appeared prima facie similar. Jules Guérin, whose shady past both disqualified him from the public trust and prepared him to win its confidence, based his popular appeal on his status as and “outsider,” positioning himself as the leader of a people’s movement that was simultaneously antagonistic to the state and fundamentally nationalist, thus embodying and pioneering the contradictory character that is at the heart of authoritarian movements and their leaders. The concrete, virile nationalism espoused by certain elite thinkers sympathetic to Guérin and his motley crew highlighted the power of the disorganized but emboldened masses and chillingly previewed the self-immolation of the many intellectuals seduced by fascism in the 1930s.
Nihilism, a corrupted (and often destructive) skepticism that finds nothing acceptable in the constituted order of things, infected both sides of the ideological divide so much so that the issue at stake in the Dreyfus Affair wasn’t justice as such but rather which side would win: the partisans of authority or the partisans of a secular civilian France–in other words, proponents of the mob or proponents of republicanism. Labor leaders and unions, viewing the controversy as a bourgeois squabble, stayed out of it. Workers came out against their traditional enemies, the Church and the rich, but were so dispirited by a republic mired in corruption that they refused to support republicanism as such by invoking its values of equality and justice.
The time was ripe for a coup d’état led by the Jesuits and carried out by the army. Supporters of such a revolution promised an end to corruption. It was an oath blessed and sealed by the mob whose enmity toward the entrenched clergy and the wealthy finally drove workers into the streets. Echoing Tocqueville, Clemenceau condemned the actions of the increasingly coercive mob, declaring: “The people is not God...A collective tyrant is no more acceptable than a tyrant ensconced upon a throne.”
The Dreyfusards–those defending the accused officer–were sprinkled across society with little in common save their personal integrity and commitment to a functioning republic. Nearly voiceless in Parliament, they faced a political class inimical to republican ideals and a fair trial. To the mob, Dreyfus represented the face of corruption in international politics. Corruption and conspiracy–difficult to perceive and even harder to root out–had long engendered financial ruin, political instability, and social unrest across the nation. Having allegedly found the concrete source of these problems (Dreyfus specifically and Jews more generally), the mob was relieved that corruption could be blamed on an “other” and eager to reinforce this blame through vengeance, a goal that far outweighed the perceived benefits of republicanism. A solid bloc of Catholics were allied across party lines and even across international borders in a conscious denunciation of “international Jewry,” directly and indirectly lending support to an imperialist politics that cunningly tied antisemitism to questions of national expansion: Jews were identified with the British conquest of Egypt (an offensive to retain control of the Suez Canal), and more generally with power and international influence, given the visibility of the English wing of the Rothschilds.
V) The Jews and the Dreyfusards
The Dreyfus case demonstrated that a Jew, no matter his status and wealth, could be reduced to a pariah, a social outcast. The emancipated Jews could barely digest this turn, and their pronounced patriotism of self-preferment earned them the scorn of one of Dreyfus’ staunchest supporters, Bernard Lazare. In their passion for legal equality, they ignored the political courage it took to protect those rights; their assimilation into a class obsessed with snobbery and profit fostered disdain of their poorer eastern brothers and blinded them to the politics of the Affair–in particular, the role of political antisemitism. Perceiving this pattern, Clemenceau referred to such people as “the unfortunates, who pose as leaders of their people and promptly leave them in the lurch.” The few Jews who did rally to Dreyfus’ defense hoped to prove a judicial misunderstanding, a strategy that induced the accused to sue for clemency as if he were pleading guilty. They refused to believe he was being persecuted for being a Jew, maintaining that this was merely a coincidence.
In this way, Jews, including Dreyfusards, failed to understand the political dimensions and force of antisemitism and “shrank from starting a political fight.” They, like many republican-minded politicians of their day, misjudged the goals and motivations of the mob–a fatal mistake that would repeat itself in Weimar Germany.
VI) The Pardon and Its Significance
Ever sensitive to the narrative elements of historical events, Arendt qualifies the affair as a “comedy” inasmuch as the farcical posturing of the players lent itself to satire on the way to a “happy ending” for the Dreyfusards. Indeed, the threat that negative publicity might blemish the Paris Exposition of 1900 or even provoke a boycott, achieved what Zola’s “J’Accuse…!” and Jaurès’ speeches could not. With the eyes of the international community upon them, Parliament voted in favor of a retrial, and the newly-elected President Loubet followed their lead, pardoning Dreyfus and putting the affair to rest before social division and unrest could undermine the Exposition. Socialists, especially Jaurès, looked upon the conclusion as a rousing victory: Their support for Dreyfus had been rewarded at last, demonstrating their influence in the public sphere. This, they were certain, would grant them a stronger position in Parliament and in politics generally.
Their hopes were dashed when this proved to be false. The Socialists failed to attract the support of the public or their colleagues in Parliament, and the motion for a retrial failed. One crowning irony was the patent illegitimacy of an acquittal without the benefit of a retrial, which left Dreyfus open to endless suspicion and disfavor. The compromise was acceptable to the Republic, if not to staunch Dreyfusards, but the affair was a scalding defeat for the Church, marking the end of clerical antisemitism which the public had come to associate with the unrest and conflict that had rocked the nation during the affair. It became clear that clerical antisemitism had truly fallen out of favor when Drumont, the rabble-rousing editor of the Libre Parole, failed in his attempt to join the august body of the Academie Française in 1909.
While other historians get mired in the details of the case, Arendt cuts to the heart of the affair: Despite years of social and political turmoil, the only substantive result was the birth of the Zionist movement, which must be seen as the “only ideology in which they [the Jews] have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.” To anyone capable of interpreting the true meaning of events, it had become obvious that keeping one’s head down and hoping against the worst was no longer a viable option when faced with issues decidedly beyond the ken of local authorities. When the powers of the world come into concert against the Jews, they must respond appropriately as a unified people capable of defending itself.
So divisive was the case that no juridical resolution was ever attained, and the partisan forces of the Church and the army remained a volatile threat to the republic.
The Following are works I found helpful in completing this text:
Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time (Amos Elon) : Highly recommended portrait
of the man and his times .
The Destruction of the European Jews (Raoul Hilberg) : The first if its kind , but too detailed for the
beginner , and misleading in its treatment of precedents to Nazi persecution .
Édouard Drumont (Grégoire Kauffmann): Highly recommended portrait of the man and his times .
Wilhelm Marr: Patriarch of Anti-Semitism (Moshe Zimmerman) : Reliable , but not indispensable .
The Jewish Writings: Antisemitism (Hannah Arendt) : A good preview to what followed in 'Origins' .
The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (Norman Cantor) : Highly recommended , though
partisan in its irreverence .
The Court Jew (Selma Stern) : The only popular work in the field , a good source .
Exclusiveness and Tolerance (Jacob Katz) : Highly recommended , cited by Arendt in 'Origins'.
Disraeli (David Cesarani) : The best of several biographies consulted ; highly recommended .
The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French-Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Michael R. Marrus) : Highly recommended in-depth study of Jewish policy and attitudes .
Also illuminating were lectures by Cantor on “The Medieval Jew” (YouTube), as well as the Nazi-era historical drama based on the life of Samuel Oppenheimer, “The Jud Süss,” which presents a perfect example of the way antisemitic ideas were deceptively attached to legitimate social issues.
III) Conclusions
The French Revolution had made France the “nation par excellence,” and its famed promise of equality, brotherhood, and liberty had especially benefited its tiny and newly emancipated Jewish population. How then did the nineteenth century end with shouts of “Death to the Jews!” backed up with lethal violence?
This scenario is one example of a broader societal problem that continues to stalk communities in which there has been a history of prejudice, oppression, segregation, or mutual mistrust: The state may extend equal political rights to those previously without them (such as the Jews, in this case), but society, as represented by the man in the street, may have other ideas. The Revolution had grafted onto society rules based on Enlightenment-era values, such as reason and tolerance, but had left the army and the Church untouched. These were the two institutions that figured most prominently in the controversy that in 1898 tore France in two: the Dreyfus Affair. They were also the institutions whose conservative values most strongly captured the opinions of bourgeois society, whose members were in many respects less progressive than their enlightened slogans, diverse salons, and inclusive cultural institutions would suggest.
Social elites tend to hang together: Their members benefit from similar educational and professional opportunities; they cultivate the same manners; and they recognize each other’s abilities. As early as the 1780s, Prussian salons could pride themselves on their unbiased appreciation of Jewish contributions to the culture at large. Enlightened Jews and Gentiles were on the same page of the same book. In France, however, the army and Church had never quite embraced republican government, and the corruption and self-seeking endemic to the Third Republic, established in the wake of France’s rout by Prussia in 1871, positioned both institutions as the last bastions of stability and of the old-fashioned virtues of obedience, loyalty, and godliness. For French Jews, the very same republic was evidence of God’s favor, the arrival in the Promised Land. They prospered, multiplied, and assimilated as Frenchmen first and as Jews second. No longer were they huddled in the Eastern ghettoes of their ancestors, represented (if at all) by one or two of their own in a royal court that was eager to exploit the financial acumen and far-flung networks which the “court Jew” made available.
It was this alliance of the elite Jew with a ruling elite that inaugurated the ascension of the “exception” Jew and led to the identification of capitalism (and capitalist exploitation of the working class) with Jews themselves. The wrenching transition from feudal to market economies and then to finance-dominance gave rise to the notion of “judaization,” the purported change in social mentality that elevated money as the supreme sign of success. On this view, Jews had always been “money-hungry” and had somehow transmitted this virus to the rest of society. Jews, of course, had been shut out of farming and most trades and professions for centuries and had made the best of it by dealing in jewels, currencies, used goods, and moneylending instead. This early confluence of Jewish and court capital, well before the issuance of government bonds, would inform the leftist antisemitism that claimed Karl Marx–whether justifiably or not–as its prophet.
By the time a Jewish army captain was railroaded as a spy in the pay of Germany in 1894, a swindle of immense proportions had vaulted a guttersnipe rag, La Libre Parole, from obscurity onto the political stage. The scoop it exploited–the publication of the list of legislators bribed to prop up the failing Panama Canal Company–legitimized the paper, its bullying editor, Drumont, and most crucially, antisemitism itself. Panama set the table for the Dreyfus Affair. Sadly, it was the state itself that swindled the public–the same state that had enfranchised the Jews and demanded subservience from the Church. Citizens who increasingly found meaning in Enlightenment values and a unified republic and were less and less moved by Catholic doctrine could no longer be persuaded to persecute the Jews as “Christ-killers” and heretics. Israel had to be linked to a larger issue capable of galvanizing the people and turning law-abiding citizens into a mob ready for arson–and worse.
This raises a potential question: Wouldn’t one reasonably expect antisemitism to recede as assimilation gained ground? Events didn’t support such a scenario. Arendt is very clear on this: Contrary to expectation, political antisemitism only arrived with emancipation and social integration. Drumont proved how well a revived hatred sold newspapers and swayed elections. It was strong and uncomplicated in a global world full of change and uncertainty. Thus, Drumont and his ilk offered a simple political solution to deal with a complex set of social problems. The gist of this: Get rid of the Jews.
As revealed through the Dreyfus Affair, French Jews opted to keep their heads down and remain apolitical as far as possible in expectation of the fulfillment of the republic’s inclusive, enlightened, and democratic social contract. Justice, however, was only served some 12 years after the “degradation” of the hapless officer, a brutal inversion of the Old and New Testament ideals promising mercy and redemption. Antisemitism would slumber, to be awakened after Germany’s defeat in WWI when a host of antisemitic parties would blame the Jews for the “stab in the back” which provoked the military rebellions that punctuated Germany’s humiliation in 1918. Coupling the Jews with the shocking reversal of German ambition was the opening salvo in a war of extermination too horrifying to imagine.